


For Want of a Nail

by TheLightdancer



Category: Gamera (Movies), Godzilla (2014), Justice League, Miracleman, New Teen Titans, Planetary - Warren Ellis, Teen Titans, The Authority, The Sandman (Comics), Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2019-11-08 20:40:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 62,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17988161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In an alternate universe, Raven joins the Justice League as its youngest member while the youthful Kara Zor-El joins the Teen Titans. As both adjust to their new challenges, a dark god rises in the wings of the multiverse, seeking its overthrow and its end to create a new singular reality united in the all-consuming Undying Flame of the great Azar, the God on the Gilded Throne. Can the newly formed Justice League and its unlikely allies resist the dawning of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, or will all that is or will ever be fade without a trace?





	1. For Want of a Nail

_For want of a shoe the horse was lost,_

_For want of a horse a rider was lost._

_For want of a rider a battle was lost._

_For want of a battle, a kingdom lost._

_All for want of a Horseshoe nail._

**The Watchtower, circa 2010:**

Raven had arrived in the Watchtower hoping beyond hope for aid from the seven defenders of this dimension. The encounter with the cult of The Undying Flame was one that had scarred her literally and convinced her her only hope was to flee Azarath lest the strange and eldritch religion take over the place. Seven great heroes, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Hal Jordan of the Green Lantern Corps, Zatanna Zatara the mystic, and J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter. In them lay her hopes, and possibly those of the world itself.

Unknown to Raven, both Superman and Batman had been brought to a crucial decision. In both cases, it was the tangled web of family loyalties and difficulties that had brought them thus. With his cousin not really listening to his mother and father as much as he'd hoped, he'd sent her to Jump City, knowing that Batman's own sidekick had gone there. It was his hopes that Dick and Kara might well make a difference.

While they were the first to detect the appearance of the Gordanians in Earth's space, it had been Raven's arrival that had jolted them from the familiar problems to the more arcane elements of magic. By ill circumstance, as Raven had seen it, she'd first run into Zatanna Zatara, who gazed at her with hostility as Raven was on her knees before her, hands clasped, tears running down her face, seams of magic shaking the room.

"Please help me," Raven begged with a voice that was predictably low given her partially human nature. It was a resonant and an eerie voice, one with a latent sense of divine power and wrath to be unleashed. Zatanna sighed.

"There is something very evil within you."

Raven sunk lower, tears stopping, sighing deeply. It was futile, all of this. Seeing her, Zatanna was struck by something very strange. Not fear of the demonic taint within her soul but curiosity.

"I detect in you the presence of Skath."

Raven's eyes widened in fear. "Please don't hurt me because of my father."

Zatanna's eyes widened. "You're the Gem, aren't you?"

Raven nodded.

"Diana!" Zatanna called. Wonder Woman arrived, hovering in mid-air, enjoying testing her abilities to fly within the confines of the Watchtower.

"Please hand me your lasso."

Nodding, Wonder Woman gave the lasso to Zatanna, who wrapped it around Raven. Raven's eyes widened in turn but then, realizing the power within the ropes a bit of hope gleamed in her eyes.

"The lasso will compel you to tell the truth."

"Are you your father's agent, here to willfully destroy this world?"

That same deep quasi-resonant voice echoed: "No, I am his daughter, fleeing from him and Azarath to save it. I came to you hoping beyond hope for a means to defeat him. All my life I have been hated and feared for the prophecy that the Gem of Skath sows death wherever she walks. I want to do good, to save lives, hoping that if I cannot stop the prophecy that at least in saving these lives some good will have come of a life otherwise wretched and wasted."

Zatanna blinked. She did not expect this. Wonder Woman's eyes were wide, and a sense of pity and even moistness followed, and as she rubbed her eyes Zatanna was relieved to know she wasn't the only one.

"We trust you, Raven. We will do all we can to get the Justice League to help you. You will need all the help and the protection you can get, so if things work out…."

Raven's face was one of hope and relief, hoping that perhaps, just perhaps, she had saved her own world after all.

**An hour Later, JLA meeting room:**

The members of the Justice League were silent as Raven spoke, saying:

"My mother was Angela Roth of Gotham City. She fled parents who did not love her, and a city that gave her no concern into the arms of a cult led by a man named Sebastian Blood"-at this Zatanna started though nobody else did. "The cult exploited a weak woman's will, as she told me, and led her to a ceremony to summon a force of unrelenting cosmic power."

She sighed. "My father. Trigon. She came to a library beneath Jump City, and he sired me upon the Demon's Hand there. She was taken to the realm of Azarath, a realm of beauty I shall never know. It had bright green skies and architecture that was splendid beyond imagination. Upon my birth its skies turned black and the odor of brimstone echoed. I was taken in after the High Magistrate of Azarath tried to kill me two days from my birth by the quasi-Goddess who ruled the place, Azar, granddaughter of the first Azar to establish the Temple Azarath."

She looked to them quietly, "My teacher taught me many things. Azarath itself taught me others. When she died, on my twelfth year, I was commended to my mother's care, but by then my mother was a stranger and none in Azarath were allowed to show me kindness or love. I was told to repress all that I felt, to conceal it within a rod of iron. So things held, but as Azar died a new cult began to take hold in Azarath, among small enclaves of the population.

A cult revering a blasphemous Goddess, the Undying Flame who would purge the universe of one kind of disorder for something great and dreadful. I tried to avoid them until one day they confronted me, and attempted to scar my back with the name of their Goddess. So I came here, instead, fleeing from their grasp. I was taught my father's coming was inevitable, that I exist purely to be his portal, to bring about the end of all things mortal.

I do not know if it can be stopped, if he can be stopped. If stopping him meant my being executed by your mystic, I would go so far as that. I will never be Trigon's monster."

The League looked at each other. Superman said, "It is a hard life you led." He smiled, "But you're not alone, and you won't be alone. We will give you a home. The Prophecy, Zatanna tells me, is to come to pass in two years. For those two years you shall be protected and mentored by all of us, and we shall bend all our efforts to stopping the Demon lest he rouse himself from slumber."

The League nodded collectively. "So carried. Welcome, Raven daughter of Trigon, to the Justice League of America." Raven's eyes widened and a surge of hope led to a bulb breaking, and the team shared a slightly awkward smile. Quite the challenge they'd taken on for themselves, but they were the Justice League. Nothing could or would stop them.

**Jump City, the Same Day:**

Dick Grayson, the superhero named Robin, knew that his mentor and father had, together with Silas Stone of S.T.A.R. Labs prepared a possibility for him to step out on his own, away from Bruce. From the Joker, from….all of it. So he'd gone to the complete other side of the continent, to a city that had once been a suburb of San Francisco but had grown rather larger in the wake of the destructive and dramatic battle between the Justice League and the Ocean Master that had wrecked so much of San Francisco.

His plan, in theory, was to start over in a more simple fashion. Then the stars fell and he faced the unexpected presences of Garfield Logan, a former veteran of the Doom Patrol, and Victor Stone, who was expected to meet him. They'd immediately hit it off, just as the alien princess had fallen from the skies, rampaging and shooting eyebeams all over the place, shouting in an alien language. With her had come the strange toad-like species that fired lasers, destroying cars and buildings.

They were able to hold their own, somewhat, but all things considered it wasn't the best start to things. So things had remained, until a sonic boom caught people's attention. The Gordanians and the alien princess alike had been shaken, and a small crater erupted in the city when a woman in a cape, with a skirt and pantyhose-like garments for modesty raised herself from it.

She spoke in Gordanian, " _Slaver filth. Let the girl go_."

The Gordanians started. " _A Kryptonian_?"

For Robin, Beast Boy, and Cyborg, they weren't sure what precisely was more surprising. The rampaging orange-skinned alien princess, or the sudden appearance of Supergirl, Superman's cousin, in the city.

The Gordanian that spoke continued, " _Your kind is extinct, as I recall._ "

Supergirl smiled. " _Not as long as the House of El draws breath. Now, let her go_."

The Gordanian laughed. " _A fine joke. She is our property_."

Supergirl's eyes began to glow and then she noticed the three other heroes.

"Oh. I know two of you. Who's the green guy?"

Beast Boy preened.

"Garfield Logan, the amazing Beast Boy!"

Supergirl rolled her eyes. "The amazing something, all right."

Robin said, "So, you're going to work with us?"

Supergirl said, "Kal sent me here to learn some needed lessons. If I learn them with new friends and start off by helping this poor girl right here, I'll be glad to."

Robin then nodded. "Basic plan is you get the girl out of the way, we hold them off, and then we kick ass and take names."

Supergirl smiled. "My kind of plan."

The Gordanians snarled as they realized that the talking was over, but before they could start firing, Supergirl had swirled in among them, tossing them aside and grabbing Starfire, flying her out of the way.

Beast Boy transformed into a bear that roared and charged the Gordanians, while Cyborg fired his sonic cannons from both arms, unleashing waves of firepower that kept them busy, Robin's speed and skillful use of corners making the larger and more cumbersome Gordanians never quite able to pin him down.

As Koriand'r of Tamaran struggled in her bonds, the Kryptonian said, " _Stop_."

Blinking, she spoke in Tamaranean, " _You speak this language?_ "

Supergirl smiled, " _Kryptonian scientists taught their kids all kinds of useful things. Languages were one of them_." She said, " _I can get these off of you. Give me a second_." Nodding, Starfire then saw Supergirl's eyes glow as her head vision melted the restraints, and as she soared into the air, Supergirl and Starfire returned to the fight.

Robin was growing tired, not quite as effectively able to dodge the Gordanians, but with the return of Supergirl and Starfire, as well as the more unpredictable chaos of Beast Boy's use of rhinoceros and tiger forms as well as the bear, the battle was brutal and mercilessly lopsided. The Gordanians, despairing of their ability to fight a very angry Tamaranean who was taking tremendous pleasure in avenging her torment, and a Kryptonian who was likewise showing far less mercy and restraint than the Man of Tomorrow, soon beat a hasty and unglamorous retreat.

Smiling as they looked at each other, Starfire then swiftly pulled Dick Grayson into a kiss, as Kara smirked, and then sighed happily. "Oh most glorious of days, I am free of those filth!"

Robin looked to his friends. It had been their first outing as a potential team, and now…."Guys, I know there's a giant tower with a T on it waiting for a superhero team to use it. I was coming here to protect the city but I could use friends I know and we would all be grateful if you would join us."

"Yes, friend, I would be most grateful!" He smiled.

"I'm Robin." Introducing himself to the team, he said, "For lack of anyone else for the job, I volunteer myself for leader."

Supergirl sardonically saluted. "All hail fearless leader!"

Beast Boy said, "I'm Beast Boy. A magnificent animal kingdom crammed into a single individual." The rest of the team quietly just looked at each other and didn't say anything.

Cyborg said, "I'm Victor Stone. I came here to work with Robin, and to test out these prosthetics my dad gave me. You can call me Cyborg."

Starfire said, "I am Koriand'r of Tamaran. Those…..scum…sought to hold me prisoner, but I would love to be with the rest of you as friends. You may call me Starfire."

Supergirl smiled and said, "The symbol of the House of El hardly needs introduction on this world, but I am Kara Zor-El, cousin to Kal-El, the Man of Steel. My cousin and I had…difficulties…because I didn't fit in as neatly into this world as he did. So….if we're going to be a team, we do need a name."

Robin smiled. "If we're going to be in a giant T, why not the Titans?"

Supergirl laughed. "And as long as we're all teenagers, why not the Teen Titans?"

The team nodded, and as they moved into their Tower, a tall man in a black and orange suit monitored two separate screens. At first he'd been intrigued at a means to get revenge on Wayne Enterprises for screwing him out of a contract following the return of that useless playboy, Bruce Wayne, to run the company by taking Robin and remaking him in his image. But then he'd learned of the newest member of the Justice League, and seen someone of still greater potential.

Deathstroke in particular was intrigued by the resemblance of the girl in the Justice League to someone he knew of from his occult studies and bargains with the eldritch nightmare known as Trigon. Trigon had said his Gem had fled the place he'd intended her to remain until he came, and that she would be identifiable by dark purple hair and an unnatural greyish hue to her skin.

Deathstroke relaxed, placing his feet on his desk, and muttered to himself, "Which shall I claim as mine? The God or the Demon?" As he looked at the left screen, he saw on the right the image of Supergirl landing in Jump City and cratering the street, and the supreme ease with which she'd dispatched the Gordanians.

A voice rumbled in his head, the voice of the Eldritch entity with which he'd made his bargain:

_The gem is born of Evil's fire, the Gem shall be his portal, he comes to claim, he comes to sire, the end of all things mortal._

To satisfy the demon to which he'd sold his soul, or to gain a God on his side and pit the God against the Demon in hopes of freeing himself? Decisions, decisions…

**The Watchtower:**

Raven finished setting up her room and placed her hands on her hips, taking a deep breath. Two years to train to destroy her father, to gain the trust and perhaps not just the aid but the family of the Justice League. And perhaps here to gain a fuller understanding and mastery of her powers. This was going to be a new experience.

She looked at her cards she used at times to augment her unpredictable visions of the future. On one of them was a horseshoe nail, and she laughed.

"A horseshoe nail? Really?" She cast it aside calmly, unaware that the Watchtower had been infiltrated by a small camera that revealed all that went on with her to Deathstroke, whose eye narrowed with recognition when he saw a particular book in her room. The Gem on the Justice League? "Trigon will never pay me enough for this if he really understands what this means."


	2. Divide et Impera

**Deathstroke's Study:**

It amused Deathstroke that one of the very first missions the Justice League assigned their newest person to do was to check up on the Teen Titans. He understood there were ties between Robin and the Batman, and between Superman and Supergirl, and desires on the part of aggrieved families to remain whole that motivated this. What none could have expected was the great benefit in drawing together both of his targets, and in testing them both. The rumbling of the potential displeasure of Trigon reminded him that he did not truth have full freedom of action, much as he might wish he did. Though part of him wished to see what would happen if he drew out this half-demon, if the JLA really accepted the implications of having her as one of their own. He also knew that while in theory it could be simple to draw into his web of control a Kryptonian, that the hazards of controlling both were real. One might mangle merely his body if it went wrong, the other could mangle his soul. "Decisions decisions."

 

Going to Cinderblock, he told him, "Go to the Jump City Prison, bring me Plasmus. Do not kill anyone."

Cinderblock rose, smiling, and maneuvered on to the prison.

 

**Titans Tower:**

 

The newest member of the Justice League meditated away from the Titans, quietly ignoring an argument between Cyborg and Beast Boy. She knew why the JLA had sent her here, and in truth she was relieved to see that Starfire and Supergirl were getting along splendidly. Both were far more girly than she was, and both were by turns amused and bemused at the blend of maturity and willingness to fight on the part of the boys. She would be relieved to report to Batman and Superman the way things were going.And was surprisingly touched that one of the first missions she was sent on was to meet other superheroes her age. It was bewildering after the experiences of old Azarath and what it became, but not in a sense that she abhorred or made some great resistance to.

 

**The Prison:**

Cinderblock marched to the walls, facing a set of guards. This prison housed both regular and Metahuman prisoners, and as such the guards were equipped with a mixture of M16s, military grade, and experimental plasma rifles that would presumably be rather more deterrent in the event that some of the metahuman prisoners escaped. The bullets and plasma alike had rather little effect on Cinderblock, who simply tore through the wire and started smashing through walls like a juggernaut. There was, all the same, something eerie in the virtual silence of the monster and the thunderous impact of its tremendous bulk as it charged through walls. The initial slamming of firepower into it slacked off when the firepower proved useless and not a deterrence, and the guards immediately chose to take advantage of the new superheroes, pressing the button connected to the newly dubbed Titans Tower.

**Titans Tower:**

The alarm rang and as the Titans scrambled, Robin shouted, "Titans Go!"

As the Titans prepared to head to their plane, Raven said, "Wait, I can teleport everyone!"

Deciding that it would be simpler this way, within a flash of black light the entire team plus Raven had arrived at the prison, where Cinderblock continued to rampage through, leaving a trail of broken walls and doors behind him. As he continued his search for Plasmius, he heard Robin say, "You know, normally the bad guys try to break out of jail."

The automaton stopped and looked around, and prepared to move only for Robin to appear saying, "I can think of one good reason."

"Two," said Cyborg, appearing with both of his cannons heating up.

"Three," said Beast Boy, transforming into a massive gorilla that beat its chest, the thumping sound rather loud in the empty hallway.

"Four," said Starfire, who hovered on his left, eyes burning a brilliant spectral green.

"Five," said Supergirl, whose eyes were a crimson hue, the color of blood, as she looked at him calmly.

"Six," said Raven, who phased through walls, hovering with frost forming where the portal had been and a brief chill misting the breath of everyone in the prison.

Robin said, "No matter how you add up the math, it all adds up to you going down. So, are we going to do this quietly or…."

Cyborg said, "Or is this gonna get loud?" as his cannons prepared to fire and Robin shouted, "Titans Go!"

Cyborg's beams slammed into Cinderblock as he tossed Beast Boy aside. Supergirl swooped in, eyebeams slicing into Cinderblock's arms, the automaton growling as he lunged for her, and as the Prisoners escaped, Raven decided that she'd best handle the means to stop them escaping. In the week since she'd joined the JLA, she'd gained a bit more confidence in what she could do and how she could do it. No less than forty prisoners, some armed with shivs, faced one girl, clad in a modified slightly variant of her leotard, with a JLA communicator visible. Making the 'come get some' gesture, the crooks ran only for Raven to experiment with something that Zatanna and Aquaman had been starting to teach her.

She said, "Calmness shall consume you," and as the prisoners ran they suddenly slowed, standing around, looking at each other curiously.

"Gentlemen, please return to your cells. The unpleasantness shall be handled shortly." With that same power augmented by the emotions she'd eaten, the prisoners did return, and Raven fell to her knees, hacking up a bit of black-hued energy.

Deathstroke's eye widened. Meanwhile, on his other screen, the Teen Titans continued to fight Cinderblock. Between the sonic cannons, starbolts, and heat vision, Cinderblock's main relief was throwing off a Beast Boy who tried to land on him as a hawk, and Cinderblock surged and managed to grab both of the women, seeking to constrain their arms. Starfire said, "Sorry to disappoint you," beginning as Supergirl smiled, and finished "but we are stronger than we look." Both flashed each other a parallel cynical smile, and with that, both flexed out of the control, blasting Cinderblock on his back.

As Supergirl hovered, she saw Beast Boy turn into a Tyrannosaurus, only for Cinderblock to recover surprisingly quick for someone who'd been booted around by a Kryptonian and throw him straight at Cyborg and Robin, transforming back to human and sheepishly saying, "Look out for falling dinosaurs."

Rolling her eyes, she heard Robin say, "Want to bring the sonic boom?"

Cyborg laughed and said, "Hell yes. I've got the sonic…." Robin grinned, "and I've got the boom."

As Robin threw a grenade and Cyborg blasted with his sonic cannons, Cinderblock just was stopped for a step and then surged forward. "By Rao, what is this thing?" Supergirl swooped downward, slamming into Cinderblock with a blow of such power that it cast shockwaves sufficient to knock over all the Titans and Raven, who'd just teleported back to where the fighting happened. It also hurled Cinderblock through two walls, the massive hunk of stone landing right next to a particular jail cell. His eyes turned to the cell, Cinderblock smiled and rose, still seemingly none the worse for wear, and said, "Fools cannot stop Cinderblock" as he proceeded to break open the jail cell where Plasmus was headed.

He even favored Supergirl with a mocking smile, escaping with the prisoner. Supergirl blinked, realizing just what she'd done. "Kal will never let me hear the end of this."

As the Titans dusted themselves off and returned, Deathstroke nodded, reading the books he had on the nature of the Gem of Skath. It would be highly risky to seek to claim both, but the rewards, he decided, of taming and controlling the Gem of Skath outweighed the rewards of seeking to do with Kara Zor-El. There was a probability that in seeking to control and isolate Raven he might face the Justice League, but it was a smaller one given they appeared to know of her background. Where seeking to control Kara Zor-El all but guaranteed the appearance of a tremendously angry and destructive Superman who would be coming to his base with intent to kill. And while Kryptonite was around, it would not be easy to use for what he wished. As he thought further, Deathstroke smiled behind his armor. It would even work to set up a diversion. Make the Titans and the Justice League believe his plans focused on the Titans, even as his true goal was the subversion of the Justice League's newest member and the transformation of the Gem of Skath into his willing ally. When Cinderblock arrived with Plasmus, he said, "Cinderblock, I see your mission was a success. Now we proceed to phase two. Wake him."

As Wintergreen thumped the prison, the man within it awoke and said, "I'm awake. I should never be awake." Deathstroke looked at him. "I need you awake for what I have in mind, Plasmus."

Then, turning to Wintergreen, he said, "Activate two of my robots. I want to divide the Teen Titans from their little babysitter, and I want this to happen so that the Titans become focused enough on Plasmus they forget about Raven for a time."

Wintergreen nodded. He said, "You are sure the risk of getting the Justice League as an enemy…"

"I am sure, Wintergreen," and with the frostiness in his master's voice, Wintergreen sighed, nodded, and went on to awaken Plasmus, who soon surged out into a rampage through the city.

**Titans Tower:**

As the Titans recuperated from the battle, Supergirl rubbed her head as Robin continued to rant about the foolishness in giving Cinderblock exactly what he wanted. He kept shouting about how they weren't a team, weren't anywhere near one yet, and that this was precisely the result of reckless foolishness. Only the truth in it kept Supergirl from shouting back, that and awareness that with her species, shouting back would break damn near every window in the Tower if she tried. Raven, meanwhile, had finished her first part of her report to the Justice League, saying, "I don't think there's anything to worry about. Robin and Supergirl are a bit balky at present, but I believe that's as much the newness of the team. I have every faith that they'll work together, and become as much a family as a team, and I believe with some of them, they need it more than they'll be willing to admit."

The grim face of the Batman looked into her eyes as he said, "I heard you kept the prisoners from breaking out in the riot." She nodded. "I did. It turns out that Arthur was right. I can, if I wish, contain crowds by absorbing the wrath and anger that keeps mob psychology going."

Nodding, Batman said, "Good work. I expect since Cinderblock broke Plasmus out of jail there won't be long before he returns. Help the Titans to put him back in his can and then return to the Watchtower."

Raven nodded, quietly, her hood still up. As she closed down the communications and hovered out, she saw Supergirl hovering, eyes glowing, as she looked down at a slightly abashed Robin. The disorienting of material there and the gale that had sounded like human speech provided the clues.

"Sorry, Kara." Robin rubbed his head. "I got irritated and that's not wise."

She sighed, "I'm sorry too. It happens."

The team breathed a sigh of relief, as Beast Boy transformed from a cat back to a boy. "Remind me never to get on her bad side."

As Supergirl turned and glared at him slightly, he cringed and said, "Please don't kill me."

As the Titans turned to the screen, they saw Plasmus starting to drink down toxic waste. As they prepared to leave, Raven teleported them again to the site where Plasmus was feeding on things, Robin saying, "That can't be good for you."

As the Titans arrived, Raven soon found herself facing not one but four identical opponents, each equipped with staffs and blades, blades that her demonically enhanced vision enabled her to recognize had a kind of anti-demon warding. Deathstroke said, "Now we give this girl her real test," while watching the Titans.

As the Titans prepared to fight, Supergirl said, "Wait, where's Raven?"

Robin said, "We've got our immediate priority, she'll get here when she gets here." "Titans GO!"

As the Titans flew at Plasmus, Cinderblock appeared as well, breaking through a wall like the Kool Aid Man's stonier cousin from Hell. The Titans were taken aback, but as they then went to the fight, Plasmus began to hurl sludge at the Titans, who dodged, while Cinderblock's own attacks were parried by Supergirl's swift-moving sets of fists and eyebeams. As Cinderblock growled, Supergirl sighed. "Enough of acting like everyone else is made of cardboard."

She grinned, eyes glowing, "Because I know you can take it, can't you big boy?"

With that, she drew back her fist, and then smashed into Cinderblock with an even more overpoweringly strong uppercut that hurled shockwaves sufficient to knock Plasmus, who'd just been ventilated by Starfire, down. The impact was sufficient to disable Cinderblock, who fell on his back, stunned. And wouldn't rise for some time to come. It also blew the rest of the team around, scattering them, but as Starfire said, "Did I let him have it too much?" Plasmus resealed back together. A few feet over: The impact of Supergirl's blow didn't disable Raven as much because she telekinetically anchored her feet to the ground, but it did jostle around the robots, knocking the staffs out of the hands of two. With that, Raven soon grabbed them both and suspended them in the air, until another lunged at her with a warded sword, forcing her forward. As she dropped the robots, she found herself forming shields as fast as the warded swords broke them, until she noticed that one of the dropped robots had a broken, shattered leg that didn't bleed or ooze bone but sparked, revealing a metal skeleton.

Blinking, she then unleashed carefully targeted blasts that disabled the arms that held the warded weapons, grateful for her training at the hands of the Justice League and that they'd made her practice this for hours. When she saw J'onn again she'd buy him a whole store-sized package of Choc-Os. As she was able to disable three of the robots, she faced a fourth that revealed something that dismayed her. A warded chain, complete with a flexible degree of motion that outpaced her ability to zero in on it. Backing against the wall, she barely had the time to notice or focus on the Titans, as Supergirl froze Plasmus with her super-breath, and then proceeded to slam him into a wall, after Plasmus had outmaneuvered the other traps and disabled most of the other Titans, at least temporarily. As he transformed back into his human form, the Teen Titans rose to their feet, as Supergirl then said, "OK, seriously, where is Raven?"

They then blinked as they saw Raven in the distance, fighting a robot that had a specialized kind of chain that hit her and led to her flesh literally smoking. With their keen senses, Beast Boy and Supergirl smelled the odor of burning flesh and while Beast Boy began to transform, Supergirl solved things much more brutally and simply, hearing the small whirring that made clear what she was facing was in fact a robot. The Deathstroke-bot barely had time to look up and when it did its own eye widened as Supergirl collided into it with force sufficient to shatter it. Raven remained on the ground, moaning a bit in pain, blood dripping from one side of her mouth. "T-Thank you."

Supergirl nodded. As the rest of the Titans arrived, Robin said, "Sorry we left you behind."

Raven said, "I'm not on your team and you guys were busy with other-" she groaned, "Azar that chain hurt."

As Starfire and Supergirl helped her up, Cyborg said, "We'll take you to our infirmary if you'd like."

Raven groaned, "No, I'll be fine."

As she activated her power and teleported them to the Tower, she then passed out upon landing, blood still oozing from her mouth. The team looked at each other and placed her on their couch, where she ended up hovering for a bit, healing the wounds in a healing trance, and then woke up. She looked at them in a slightly embarrassed fashion. "Thank you."

"No prob, Ray!"

As Garfield puffed out his chest, Raven and Supergirl rolled their eyes and the rest of the team snickered. Raven walked to the communications monitor, and said to the Justice League, "Plasmus apprehended successfully. I will be back in a few minutes."

As she prepared to teleport, she smiled at the team. Returning to the Watchtower, Raven went to her room to meditate for a bit. As she did so, the Justice League trained and dug around in refrigerators to eat and palled around, until their own alarm blared an hour later. As Raven's eyes opened, she hovered into the Justice League's common room. She saw a tall and monstrous-seeming figure with skeletal protrusions over his body, a grey-skinned hulk of a thing with bones that seemed to guard its eyes and form protrusions from its chin, extending as well from its elbows and knees. The creature smashed its hands together and roared in a bellowing and triumphal sound, as the Justice League looked at each other. "I thought we'd destroyed Doomsday all those years ago in Metropolis." Superman shook his head. "There was another abomination like that one from Krypton all those years ago. The records my father left said the abomination had been destroyed. This makes clear it wasn't." As the League prepared to return to Earth, Raven looked with determination to what would be her second major superhero fight, and her first with the League. None at this point in time questioned the sudden actions of two such schemes in succession, nor why that was so. Only in retrospect would even Deathstroke understand, though Doomsday itself was beyond understanding.

**Deathstroke's Mansion:**

Deathstroke was convinced now of what his true plans were. But first there were the not so minor problems of deceiving psychics and mystics on two teams and trying to isolate Raven without the rest of the League coming after him. Then he looked on screen to Metropolis, where the Justice League had arrived to confront a monstrous bony hulk that roared in animalistic fashion, and within his mask his smile became carnivorous. In Jump City he needed to employ villains as distractions. The Justice League's very job would make his task easier without his having to lift a finger.


	3. Slow Dreams of Eternity

**Jump City:**

Kara waited for Kal to call her to help him confront the Kryptonian abomination. The call never came and Supergirl progressively got in a more and more sour mood, the rest of the team walking on eggshells around their teammate who could casually fracture planet Earth with a sufficient display of temper. 

**Metropolis:**

The Doomsday Monster roared in a bellowing howl as the Justice League landed by it. Superman said, "Aquaman, Wonder Woman, J'onn and I will go after the monster. Batman, you, Raven, and Hal keep civilians out of the way." Nodding, the team split up with the intent to do this. Deathstroke, pressing a button, sought to activate his new robots, intending to exploit the havoc raised by the monster.

As Superman and the Martian Manhunter hovered near the creature, Aquaman pulled his massive trident, the direct gift of the God Poseidon, from his back. Wonder Woman likewise prepared her lasso. The creature pounded its fists together and bellowed in mindless wrath again and lunged at them as the heroes swooped in a sudden rush. The twin blows of Superman and the Martian Manhunter knocked Doomsday backward, as Aquaman hurled his trident forward. The trident sank deeply into the beast's flesh, producing an agonizing howl from the creature and a spurting gout of blood, blood that was black in hue, though the wound swiftly began to close and heal, and the only impact was to briefly focus the monster's movements toward Aquaman, even as Superman moved in an attempt to grasp the creature's fist. 

As Raven and Batman and Green Lantern ensured that civilians left, Raven ensuring calm and not panic even with a monster that reacted to its injury by lunging forward and smashing Superman upward heels over head with a tremendous blow, as Doomsday dealt a reminder that he was as fast Superman and caught Superman by surprise with a blow to his chin, before being struck by fist and trident alike by Wonder Woman and Aquaman, as the Martian Manhunter deliberately fired his heat vision into the creature's wounds.

The combined blows were sufficient to sap the creature enough that as Superman returned, all of them continued to rain blows and wounds on the creature, each hoping that this particular Doomsday would remain focused on them and not on the civilians around them. The monster, increasingly enraged at having to fight for its own survival, managed to clutch Superman's cape and whirled him around, scattering the rest of the heroes, even though the wounds of Aquaman's trident were not healing as they increased in frequency and depth and the physical impact and those of the eye-beams began to sap the creature's life from it, and the bleeding slowly and by degrees sapped the beast's strength, especially since the trident had mangled two of its most necessary organs.

With the heroes briefly scattered, the monster leaped into the air, and as its arc carried it down to where Raven was ensuring a crowd left, it was her calmness-influence that kept the crowd from randomly scattering in a manner guaranteed to produced a massacre as she shielded it. Doomsday landed on her shield and rolled off, the beast roaring mindlessly again. It hurled itself forward, fists smashing on her shield. Each blow felt like a collision with a truck, and as the blasts continued, the monster struck harder and harder blows. In the Watchtower, Zatanna kept an eye on the battle, noting to Batman that "the monster's going after Raven."

"I'll be on my way as soon as I get these civilians out of the way." As the monster struck yet again, Raven's nose began to bleed with the sheer strain of maintaining her Soul-Self, only for Superman to collide into the creature, lifting the struggling monster into the air. Relieved, Raven then ensured the crowd left, her shield dropping, and as robots began to surround her she fell unconscious, the sheer weight of holding back an enraged Doomsday overwhelming her.

Zatanna's eyes widened. Robots in black and orange armor, with one eye and half the face concealed by a mask. "Deathstroke the Terminator? I thought he was dead?"

Blinking, she was shocked when one of the robots struck Raven hard, knocking her unconscious and bruising her face and slinging her over its shoulder calmly. Raven, fortunately, had cleared the area. Superman, for his part, felt the monster jab him in the side with the huge spike on its elbow and yelled in pain, but retained his grip until the creature jabbed him twice more with both of the massive spikes.

By then Superman was heading downward himself and as he dropped the monster in the prior area the fighting went, he landed roughly on his knees. His healing factor slowly regenerated the wounds, though the monster's bellows were followed by it heading for him. As it lunged forward, the Martian Manhunter and Aquaman both collided into it, Aquaman's Trident striking it with sufficient force to impale its chest and him to lift it up, as the Martian Manhunter's fist struck with sufficient power to shatter one of the spikes on the creature's elbows.

Aquaman slammed the creature into the ground, before holding its arms down with his trident and his knees and repeatedly punching it in the face as Superman levitated, healed by exposure to sunlight and Wonder Woman managed to grasp both of the creature's arms and restrain it with her lasso. The creature, restrained, struggled against its bonds with more mindless roars, trying to break out of the restraints as Wonder Woman placed her foot on its back, restraining the beast and Superman and the Martian Manhunter sought to keep its focus on them with a set of lightning fast super-strong blows to the face. Aquaman's trident was jammed against the creature's legs, rendering it immobile.

"We can't take this thing alive. It's not like Solomon Grundy," Wonder Woman shouted. Nodding, Clark and J'onn then looked at each other. None of the heroes liked to kill, but a monster like this was far too dangerous to be allowed to live.

"Zatanna, we've got all civilians out of the fighting zone."

"Bruce, Clark and J'onn have decided this Doomsday must be killed like the other one."

Bruce sighed. "No other option, unfortunately."

"You and Hal have something else to do."

Bruce blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Deathstroke the Terminator appears to have gone into robotics."

That stopped both of them straight.

"Deathstroke was killed years ago when Lobo and Clark got into that fight in Metropolis."

"Well, if he's dead, someone is making robot doubles and they've walked off with Raven."

"How?"

"She saved a crowd from Doomsday but the effort made her weak. The robots knocked her out and are trying to walk off with her."

"On our way."

As Batman and the Green Lantern followed, Doomsday suddenly lunged upward, hurling off his captors once more, swinging Wonder-Woman at a blinding speed straight into Superman. The only one not shaken by the creature's recovery, the Martian Manhunter, unleashed his heat vision straight into the creature's eyes, followed by a set of shattering blows that crushed the bones that extended from the creature's face like a craggy beard, chips of bone flying over the place.

Superman swiftly recovered, launching himself back, while Wonder-Woman shook her head, blurriness passing, as the monster reeled from the blows the Martian Manhunter struck, the bleeding from the wounds Aquaman inflicted reopening, turning its shoulder and chest and a good portion of its legs and stomach black, though mercifully Metropolis was spared invulnerable entrails falling out and cratering the ground, and deprive it of the ability to withstand further blows launched at full force.

The creature lurched, groaning with a bellow like an aggrieved whale, but hurling Aquaman back with a crushing punch that was followed by another that threw the Martian Manhunter up with the same force that had struck Superman, even as its bellows began to weaken and its blows to slow in speed and power. It took an hour for the cumulative effect of the bleeding and concussive force to finally kill Doomsday, by which point all of the heaviest hitters of the League were exhausted and bleeding. Superman indeed had the impression that if he'd had to fight this monster alone that the battle would have been still longer and in all probability killed him again.

It was then that they saw Batman and Green Lantern carrying a passed out Raven whose outfit was torn. "What happened here?"

Hal said, "Well, let me explain…"

 **Jump City:**

Supergirl remained hovering over Titans Tower, eyes glowing with a bright crimson hue. Starfire had finally come out to join her.

" _You do understand, Lady Kara, that your cousin did not omit you from the fight out of a lack of faith in you?_ "

Supergirl blinked. Perfect High Kryptonian, better, she flushed for a microsecond, than her own grasp of the formal language.

" _Did you learn this tongue from a kiss_?"

Starfire smiled.

" _It's one of the tongues the Citadel taught me_."

" _Citadel? H-How did someone as sweet and innocent as you end up in the Rao-accursed CITADEL_?"

Starfire smiled.

" _Oh, I was taught there early on, before enslavement. My culture is......not something I fit in easily. I do not regret, in many ways, being away from it. Not the way you do with Krypton_."

Kara nodded.

" _Believe me, Supergirl, I understand that it's not easy to fit into something when there's this....template, this mandate to fit into something that doesn't fit you. Kal-El is the Last Son of Krypton, and an amazingly awe-inspiringly good man. He is more of a god, of a symbol, than a mere human even to those like us when those who know him best know he's a man capable of those feats, but not allowing them to define him_."

She gently patted Supergirl's arm.

" _You will find your place, Kara. You don't have to be like him, or like the Krypton that was. You can be yourself, as I am me_."

Supergirl raised an eyebrow.

" _You're........that......that really helped, in so many ways, and I'm not sure what to say right now_."

Starfire smiled, and then both stiffened at the sight of a green line arcing south.

" _A Green Lantern_?" Supergirl's question was spoken with a kind of breathy awe.

And so it was. The figure hovering was red-skinned, with a strange resemblance to the old Dick Dastardly kind of stage villain.

" _I am Thaal Sinestro of the Green Lantern Corps. I presume that my colleague Jordan is on that satellite I went past_?"

" _I......think so,_ " Supergirl said, eyebrow raised and the awe in her voice equally real all the same. 

She smiled as he smiled back. " _Excellent_."

Starfire waved, and Sinestro smiled and waved back, before flying back upward to the Watchtower. 

Supergirl looked.

 _"You know that one?_ "

Starfire nodded. " _I shall tell you the story sometime, Kara Zor-El_." And then she resumed the mask.

"Well, Zatanna pointed out to us that these robots had taken Raven. The crowds were evacuated and we were fortunate that you guys kept Doomsday pinned. These robots were loaded for bear. Batman tried to take one of them down and he got shocked unconscious. I had my ring and Raven woke up after Batman passed out and it took more effort than I expected to take them down. Severing their limbs simply meant that the limbs activated a kind of spray of bullets and energy that tried to zero in on Raven. That in turn meant she had to spend more time shielding herself than helping me."

Hal sighed. "It wasn't a difficult battle, quite, just a long one. After killing each of the robots three times running, one of them managed to slip energy through Raven's shield and ripped her uniform. She's not badly hurt, and she's healing."

Raven said, her face a bit pale and her teeth gritted. "This is the second time these robots have come after me."

Wonder Woman nodded. "I remember you mentioned that in your report from the Titans."

Batman nodded. "Twice in a row isn't a coincidence. So the question now is why is Deathstroke pursuing her when either he or one of these robots employed Cinderblock in Jump City?"

The League looked at each other in concern.

"Anywho, we're all beaten up enough," began Superman, only for Raven to seemingly enter a trance, glowing hands healing each of the League members. Wounds stitched, broken bones were restored, blood was cleansed. Afterward, Raven collapsed again, moaning in pain herself. Looking at her with concern, the League held her in a bubble Green Lantern made and entered their ship, going up to the Watchtower.

Hours later, Zatanna confirmed what they suspected. What injuries they sustained up to a point, Raven would heal….at the price of taking on their pains into her. This meant that the empath would be dealing with nearly unimaginable levels of pain the more things went on, but there would be nothing they could do about it.

**Deathstroke's Mansion:**

"Well, the League believes I'm going after at least a couple of targets."

Looking at Wintergreen, Deathstroke moved into a thinking posture.

"I suppose that leaves one option that I'll be able to pursue." He grinned. He went to one of his books, one marked with a large rune shaped like an S, with two small markings there. The mark of Skath, the demon Trigon, the being to whom he'd sold his soul those years ago in exchange for relief from all his career had done to his family.

Yes…..with such power at his disposal he could arrange a few diversions that'd keep both teams off of his tail. As he opened the books, he saw a symbol that held him spellbound for a moment before a wrenching force of effort turned him away. A two-headed dragon in deliberately crude form, one head gnawing on the other. When he looked the first time, the left head had the right one gnawing on it near the top of the picture.

Wintergreen suddenly shuddered and spoke a ritual of exorcism and Slade looked down to see that the heads had shifted. His eyes widened. Deciding swiftly to change the page, he was relieved to finish gathering what he needed for the spell. He closed the book and took a deep breath. He would need to gather a few things before darkness fell…..and then he remembered something that he'd made contact with earlier.

If he needed another distraction….he reached for the phone. The HIVE Headmistress would be able to keep the Titans focused on their challenges while he sought to extend his own plans.


	4. HIVE of Scum and Villainy

**Deathstroke's Base:**

Slade Wilson listened dispassively as he heard the HIVE Headmistress roll through her recitation. He knew at one level that it was a despicable thing to send these brats against a team that had in the presence of Kara Zor-El a physical God who probably would no-sell everything they could throw at her. But if they were in fact able to play against her, perhaps this team would be useful to send against his true target, the Gem.

He'd long-since sold his soul to the Demon Trigon*, this he knew all too well. Bargains with Demons did not end well, but they gave him the prospect to begin individually what fools like Luthor needed entire companies to seek to achieve, a bid to remake the world in his image. He muttered to himself, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King." That got the HIVE Headmistress to look toward him and he turned toward her, and briefly interrupted her speech, resuming where she left off:

"The HIVE Academy for Extraordinary Young People is proud to present these, our finest graduates." First was a midget with a jetpack, whose jet pack released lasers that severed robotic tendrils reaching toward him. "Gizmo, the genius, whose mental aptitude enables him to think his way out of any trap."

Next was a grey-haired woman whose hair was an odd pink color, eyes glowing pink. Rays of pink light hit robots, one of which fell, sparking, another of which dissolved into a literal flowing puddle of metal, a third of which exploded. "Jinx, who manipulates probability and creates hexes that can outmaneuver any foe."

The third was a tall and brutish-seeming Neanderthal-like man, his sheer size overwhelming as he tore through the robots in front of him with bare hands, ripping his foes apart and roaring in a bestial satisfaction. "Mammoth, whose genhanced physique speaks for itself."

She grinned and told him, "We are very proud of these people." Deathstroke looked.

"I see that they are suited to face mechanical foes without difficulty, but they need to show me what they can do against a living target. Let them take down the Teen Titans and we shall see what I shall use them for." She nodded.

**THE WATCHTOWER:**

As Raven meditated, she had a strange flash of…..something. A brilliant world of ivory and gold, and a disorienting vertigo-inducing rush to a great throne. The throne was seemingly almost bone and ivory in a skull-like fashion,, a ceratopsid shape to it with vast serrated horns behind the monster that sat upon it, and upon it sat a tall and a great figure in a crimson blood-red sari. Her blue eyes were inhumanly crystalline and her dish-like face seemed to move closer as the entity leaned forward, lips parting in a vicious and inhuman smile of fanged teeth. The smile was accompanied by a grisly sound of flesh peeling backward, the monstrous thing a titanic force of nature, a knife flaying into skin that as she looked down first began to burn with the runes of Trigon's Gem, than began to turn red as the visions of two eyes became the visions of four. The creature leered at her, and then as it prepared to speak the vision passed. She squawked as she fell to the ground with a thump, her meditation disrupted.

A few rooms across, the Martian Manhunter had a similar vision. He was walking in Mars when suddenly around him the Red Planet changed into a brilliant realm of ivory and gold. Hands of unstoppable force grasped him and hurled him to the Throneroom, where he beheld a monstrous figure. Tall and clad in a crimson-red sari, it seemed human save that it was closer to twenty-five feet tall, overpoweringly robust and yet feminine in a fashion that had no overlap or parallel with what human physiology was supposed to be.  A thing akin to New Genesis, or to Apokilips, something unimaginably more potent. A knife flaying the soul coated in acid and he screamed as the sensation of burning struck him. Its, no, her hair was blonde. Eyes of bright blue with crystalline irises and deep pupils that were pools of darkness blazed into him and the creature leaned forward, a monstrously wide smile crossing her face, baring those same fanged teeth.

The monster seemed to reach out for him but he blinked and the scene shifted, finding himself prostrate, coughing. He reached out to the other Psionic on the team:

_Raven?_

_I felt it, too._

Zatanna, however, felt something different to the two of them. When practicing and honing her skills in the mystic arts, the mirror she gazed into to gauge her practices displayed a very different entity. As with the other two, she saw a monstrously robust female-seeming being, blonde and blue-eyed, dishlike face with blue eyes that marked an eerie and devastating power. Instead of a red sari, the thing was clad in dark green armor with a crudely stylized two-headed dragon, the right head worrying the throat of the left one on the breastplate. The being smiled and cocked its head in an uncannily birdlike fashion, and as a hand seemed to start to reach out of the mirror, she spoke: _Enogeb nemod_!

Nothing happened.

_**I am not a demon.** _

The voice was a rumbling and echoing sound, a contralto, but one that was overlain by a tremendous force that reached into the soul. _ **I am the Undying Flame that sears what I wi**_ \- _Uinuznalehzez enogeb_! The creature blinked and the mirror restored itself to normal. She gasped. She'd read of this thing in the forbidden and blasphemous works of the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the original uncensored Al-Azif, the Arabic counter-Quran of Abdul Hazred, the mighty pagan mystic of the Abbasid era. One of the Kelzhandari, the monstrous spawn of a new Aeon, the first in vingtillions of years to do what it would. Azar.....she reflected. Raven's goddess had gone-

She heard J'onn and Raven speaking to each other and reached out to them:

_The Undying Flame. Why is she reaching out to here?_

They were silent for a moment before they heard the Intercom summoning the members together. It was when they saw the sight on the screen that they stopped, in a more than slight gaze of awe at the sight unleashed. They nodded and as they prepared to head down to the battlefield where two destructive forces of nature had been unleashed, Zatanna looked at Raven.

"You all right?" Raven nodded. She was used to the pains by then, and it seemed second nature. It was why, in the end, Azarath had taught her all it had about emptiness and fractured her psyche, for the very thing that she could do that brought the greatest good was something on its own that could overwhelm her. Could release the Gem.

The Team headed down to Coast City where Solomon Grundy had joined with the sinister Maxima of Almerac, both bellowing defiance and unleashing destruction on a potentially Hiroshima-esque scale. None at that time questioned the threading of ivory and gold through their veins, the madcap howling of Grundy that in retrospect was clearly not simply mindless grunting or 'Grundy Crush' but 'All are one in the Azar, Hail the Undying Flame. In the name of Azarath, Zezhelanzunui shall burn you all!' 

**MARIO'S PIZZA** :

As the Titans sat around discussing what kind of Pizza they wanted, Robin and Supergirl tuned out the discussion, initially focusing on the TV where the sight of Solomon Grundy and Maxima's rampage was followed by the arrival of the Justice League and their working together. Among them were a woman in fishnets and a top hat, who fired beams of mystic force, and a young girl, the youngest member, whose eyes glowed white and who shielded other members of the team and helped to move civilians out of the way.

Meanwhile Cyborg and Beast Boy were arguing: "Dude, I've been those animals!"

"Dude, meat is literally what people get pizzas FOR!"

Starfire, meanwhile, had listed literally everything on the menu on her pizza, and hearing that, Supergirl broke her concentration and whispered to her gently, "Starfire, not everything is a topping." Starfire nodded, meekly. "Oh."

As Supergirl smiled, she perked up. She'd heard a couple of things. Unnatural ones. A bus rumbling down the street, engine on, but she'd heard that it had been pushed. A baby-carriage likewise, but one without an actual baby in it.

She murmured, "What the fu-" Robin saw the bus and the carriage and as Supergirl said, "Guys w-" "TITANS GO!"

As Starfire went to the carriage, Supergirl tried again, "Guys, w-"

Cyborg stopped the bus, and as he and Beast Boy looked in, the bus was empty. Starfire held a teddy bear. "Um, I thought buses had drivers?" Cyborg asked, while Starfire looked and said, "I thought baby carriages had bab-" they heard a voice. Gizmo came in on his jet pack. "Are you pit sniffers always this stupid?"

As the Titans looked uncomprehendingly, the bear exploded, launching Starfire into the sky as Mammoth hurled the bus at the team. Supergirl's eyes turned red and she sliced the bus in half. As the HIVE looked at each other, they launched themselves at the team. Cyborg launched himself at Gizmo, only to be grabbed by Mammoth who asked him, "What do you call a guy who flies by jet pack?"

"I dunno, what?"

"Duped!" as Gizmo activated the pack and Cyborg hurled himself into the skies, trying to de-activate the pack. Beast Boy transformed into a rhino, hurling himself forward as an intentional unstoppable force, only for Mammoth to dig his feet into the ground, carving grooves into the street and slowing his momentum as Jinx zapped him, turning him back into Garfield Logan. As the team looked confident, Kara Zor-El hovered over them.

"That was unwise," she growled, her eyes beginning to heat up.

"Here goes nothing," Jinx said, as she fired several hexes at Supergirl. Two of them had no effect on her other than making her mad as Supergirl began to swoop down toward her, the third hit her square in the face with concussive force sufficient to hurl her up into the sky. Smirking, the HIVE then faced Robin, who launched himself at them only to be blast into the park by Jinx's hexes.

"How droll," Jinx laughed.

Supergirl growled more deeply and then maneuvered herself into the sky, catching Cyborg and removing the jetpack, crushing it in one fist and holding Cyborg away and shielding him from the brunt of the blast, while flying back with him, finding Starfire and Beast Boy with them. As she told Beast Boy, "Can you change back into a bird?" He nodded.

Starfire asked, "Where's Robin?" Supergirl's telescopic and X-ray vision fired around the city and she then smiled at the sight of Robin on a speedboat headed back to the Tower. "He's all right. Are you?" Starfire nodded. "Just mad." Supergirl grinned. "Well, we can't change what happened. We need to go back to the Tower and regroup."

The Titans flew back. As they discussed things, they were startled when the HIVE blasted in through a window.

"SERIOUSLY?" Robin's yell led to the HIVE laughing, as they said, "Hell yeah. This is our house now." Supergirl launched herself forward only for Jinx to hit her with a hex that managed to throw her through the floor, knocking her unconscious for a moment. Without Kara present, the same pattern repeated itself, the deadly combination of Jinx's hexes, Mammoth's strength, and Gizmo's gadgets leading to all of the Titans plunged into the ocean. Even the barrage of Starbolts and sonic lasers couldn't alter this, nor could all Robin's Birdarangs and Martial Arts wizardry. As the Titans swam to the nearest island to the one their tower was on, Supergirl awoke and decided enough with one kind of game. Her eyes glowed and then she blurred at that level her kind were capable of, the daughter of Krypton empowered by the daystar moving as one within the shadows. 

The HIVE had messed with her team enough, it was time to even the scales and make them Beware the Supergirl. In a sudden movement aided by her super-speed as stealth, something she'd learned from observing the use of it by Faora ul-Hul in the Battle of Smallville, she turned off all the lights in that room and in a specific hall. The sudden rush rattled the HIVE.

"Um….." they heard Gizmo's nasal voice speaking. "We did get rid of all those Titans jerks, right?"

They moved cautiously toward the hall where Supergirl's room was. Bunching together in a triangular pattern, Gizmo on the left, Jinx on the right, Mammoth behind them, they were more rattled in the darkness enough that they failed to consider turning on lights. As they reached to her room, two glowing red lights suddenly appeared.

"Oh shit," was all Gizmo had time to say before Supergirl suddenly and brutally lunged forward, tearing off his jetpack and knocking him unconscious with a bitch-slap, followed by Mammoth smashed into the floor repeatedly until he was unconscious. As Jinx's hands glowed, Supergirl simply knocked her down with a gust of her super-breath, telling her, "Don't make me angry. You won't like me when I'm angry." Jinx whimpered "OK, I'll be good." As Supergirl placed them all in dampeners, and then flew over to the island, she smiled, seeing her team all together and ready to return.

Beast Boy cheered. "We don't have to live on this island anymore!" Eyes rolled all over the place.

**COAST CITY:**

Grundy and Maxima were enjoying the fight a bit more than the League that gathered around them. It was a brutal and straightforward slugfest, Superman, the Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman facing both intermittently, Superman facing off in particular with the gloriously hammy and bellowing Maxima, while Grundy faced the entirety of the rest of the League at times. Raven and Zatanna worked together, firing blasts of mystic force that kept Grundy both off his feet and prevented him from fully focusing or applying his strength, which was vital when only Aquaman was available to add sheer raw physical heft, as Wonder Woman kept maneuvering with great swiftness but never focusing too much on one target at the same time. This did raise concern, as did the glowing sickly green hue that took over Grundy's eyes at points when he took blows that should have flattened him, as it did with Maxima's vision.

The fight had gone on for two hours when Maxima finally was overpowered by Superman and the Martian Manhunter and clapped into power suppressors, and the Manhunter made her sleep. As this went on, the fight with Grundy became a new focus. Grundy's raw unpredictable strength and chaotic combination of mindlessness and ruthless cleverness meant that he was able to at this point not only force Batman, Zatanna, and Raven to retreat with hobbled legs due to need for crowd control, but to face the Martian Manhunter, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman while taking injuries that would have both crippled and been mortally fatal to a lesser monster. With Grundy, they simply seemed to make him madder, and as Grundy surged forward, it took a combination of a trident impaling him and simultaneous blasts from four rays of heat vision and Wonder Woman's sword to still the monster and cause its vitality to finally collapse.

Gratified with their success, the League failed to note the appearance of Deathstroke, who'd just learned of the HIVE's failure.

He told the HIVE Headmistress, "In truth I did not expect them to succeed. That they did as much as they did against a Kryptonian in full control of her powers speaks well of them. I shall look forward to employing their services and discipline won't be necessary."

He then smiled as he began to work his mystic incantation, the Mark of Skath blazing before him. Zatanna and Raven instantly stopped, both sensing the forces invoked, and as Deathstroke finished the incantation, his voice booming, he spoke:

"Goronn** Rise!"

Before him stood a creature taller than Grundy and Doomsday, some twelve feet tall. Its form was reddish, with a colossal spiked tail. It had strange elfin ears on its side, and the demon turned to Deathstroke with a gaze of malice.

"Why have you summoned me, Mortal?" The voice was deep and rumbling with infrasound elements that instilled anxiety even in Deathstroke the summoner. He pointed below him.

"The Gem is there. I wish you to bring her to me."

Goronn's voice rumbled with those same infrasound bassos, "Very well, Deathstroke the Terminator. Your request, your desires shall be gratified. But upon my return to my plane, I shall inform my father and the Gem's brothers of your schemes. I am not so certain that Belial and Skuge shall think kindly of a mere mortal intending to enslave the Gem, especially given your," the infrasound lingered on the last syllable before rumbling even more profoundly and sinisterly with an undertone of gruesome amusement, "predilections. Even Lord Trigon the Terrible has some standards with what he allows to happen to his property."

He looked at the League.

"These mere mortals in gaudy costumes are why you have summoned me?"

Looking at them ensuring the stilling of Maxima and Grundy, deliberately veiling himself from the sight of the Gem and the mage in the top hat.

Goronn's face broke out into a savage leer. "I look forward to the challenge, Deathstroke. And won't the dear Gem be so surprised to see manifestations of her Father's realm before her?"

A demon's laughter carried on the winds of Coast City as the League departed, bringing the two to Belle Reve, where they could reasonably be contained, at least for a time. Goronn followed, remaining veiled from their sight, glorying in the freedom of being active on the mortal plane….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * This is a headcanon reflecting the Slade of 'Forces of Nature' and his literally using the Mark of Scath to summon one of the fire demons of the later season. In this case with Raven on the League, Slade has a great deal invested at first in trying to pursue the path of capturing her, and his schemes on this basis will endure through multiple seasons until the take on Season 4. 
> 
> **Goronn is Trigon's first minion to target the original 80s New Teen Titans.


	5. Goronn Goes to Metropolis

**METROPOLIS:**  
  
Goronn the Gruesome, one of the most powerful of the servants of Trigon, Lord of the Malebolge, the Eighth Devil, known in some worlds as Malebolgia, in some as the Dread Dormammu, in others as Skath/Scath, as Ddrez, as Ha-Satan or Shaitan, had remained veiled for twenty-four hours. In that time he had seen the League as a whole engaged in things that were rather banal, really.  
  
It intrigued him. Gods on Earth walking and made manifest, and this is what they chose to do with their time. He'd been summoned to fetch his master's Gem, by a preening mercenary who'd sold his soul to his master and foolishly gambled on his master's mercy. The creature snorted. The Gem was spending a normal afternoon for a change watching a miniseries on television, in a safe place apartment on Schuster Lane designed by Superman for those who needed it.  
  
The creature laughed as he prepared to drop his glamor and become visible. It then stiffened when it heard a crisp female voice speak:  
  
" _Flesrouy laever nemod_!"  
  
It turned. Zatanna Zatara. A Homo magi, one of a subspecies of humanity. This common maggot-filth and carrion that thought it commanded gods because the winds of magic surged like wildfire amidst its veins. Goronn snarled.  
  
Raven blinked. She was watching a miniseries based on a controversial novel written by a member of the Friends of Humanity, an anti-metahuman group. This miniseries, Miracleman, featured a thinly veiled knockoff of Captain Marvel. She'd felt a great deal of sympathy for both Michael Moran and for Miracleman, and for the idea of wanting to be good, and to do good, when focused on evil by her creator.  
  
The last episode had featured a monstrous-looking dog-like creature that was better even than the normal special effects, though clearly transparent CGI in a few scenes. She'd put the DVR on pause to heed a few bodily functions and was sitting down to watch with fascination when the screen lit up with the peculiar crackling sound and deep basso foghorn-like effect that accompanied the shapeshifting between Moran and Miracleman.  
  
 _The Nazis were astonished to see a glowing figure of perfect beauty and blazing power walking toward them._  
  
 _"It means my time is up, gentlemen, and yours too." The voice of Miracleman was four voices overlaid, with an infrasound effect. Hypnotic._  
  
 _Background music played, children's voices._  
  
 _"Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight."_  
  
 _Miracleman grabbed the men by the head as a third gasped in fear, a wet spot on his jeans clearly showing his reaction. The men's heads were smashed together in a shower of gore and the blood reflected off of Miracleman's face. The actor almost perfectly duplicated the mixture of wrath and enjoying this that the novel had described, the children's voices echoing as the third man looked at Miracleman._  
  
 _"Wish I may wish I might, wish the wish I wish tonight."_  
  
Then she sensed a sudden flare of all too familiar energy and with a spell changed her civilian clothes to her leotard and teleported out. Goronn? Here? Why? How? Her father wouldn't send him unless he'd struck or unless….  
  
Her eyes widened. The sorcerer-mercenary in Jump City. No-one else could have done this.  
  
Goronn towered over Zatanna. The monster's tail made a sonic crack as it whipped through time and space, the creature leaning forward with his knuckles on the ground like a deformed gorilla with monstrous drooling fangs.  
  
"I serve the Lord of the Malebolge. You will make a good appetizer."  
  
Zatanna blasted the demon with magic as Raven zoomed toward him, only to hear the sonic crack as Superman slammed into the demon with both feet.  
  
"This is my city, demon. You are not welcome here."  
  
Spitting out asphalt, the demon hissed.  
  
"Alien trash seeking to lecture the true servants of the Lord of the Malebolge?"  
  
Moving with a blinding speed he hurled Superman off of him, and as Superman hovered in the air, the demon lunged forward as well, colliding into him with a tremendous sonic impact, voice booming with a terrible infrasound aspect:  
  
"My master demands the Gem, last son of the dead world."  
  
Superman's fists slammed into the demon with a rapid set of jackhammer blows that led the demon to land back in the original crater, at which point Zatanna spoke:  
  
" _Sniahc ni nemod_!"  
  
Mystic chains bound Goronn, as Zatanna rapidly formed runes around him that entrapped him within the sphere.  
  
The creature laughed.  
  
"Enochian is the language of angels, you dumb slut. It does not contain creatures like us. You studied too much of the writings of that deranged doctor and not enough of daemonology."  
  
Then the Gem appeared before him, her body glowing with her father's runes.  
  
"Right into my hands," he laughed, only to blink when she pointed to him and spoke Words of Power.  
  
His bones cracked and he fell on his face.  
  
More Words of Power followed and a sudden burning circle hurled him back into the abyss. With that, Raven snarled and for a moment two eyes became four red ones and before Superman or Zatanna could stop her she teleported in a flash of crackling white and black energy.  
  
 **DEATHSTROKE'S BASE, JUMP CITY** :  
  
Slade Wilson smiled when a sudden blast of crackling white and black energy hurled the door of his base down as though it was nothing. A being hovered in, a dark blue cape around a black leotard, four eyes gleaming in the unnatural red of the emergency lights tinting her skin as red as her eyes.  
  
 _I will be watching you. You have no idea what you are calling up. You are damned and in damnation you mistake aiding my father's quest for salvation. I will stop him, and you. As many times as needed_.  
  
Deathstroke laughed. "I'd expect nothing less of daddy's little girl."  
  
Raven's temper suddenly flared and he found himself deeply regretting that choice of phrase when she slammed him clean through the bunker with a sudden blast of black energy and then teleported away in its wake.  
  
 **METROPOLIS, SCHUSTER LANE APARTMENT** :  
  
After giving Superman and Zatanna honest answers, Raven was back on her couch, now with popcorn. And watching Miracleman to the end of that episode. She was entranced at the sight of his hurling Gargunza to Earth, after the kiss, and found herself wishing she could destroy her own creator so easily.

Something in her shuddered at a horrific sense of familiarity and future-sight at the image of a body burning and hurled through the immensity of the Earth's atmosphere, the creator of the God-being Miracleman reduced to a pelvis that was smouldering and solidified into something horribly akin to a shooting star. And that horrid children's chorus singing:

_Wish I may wish I might, wish the wish I'd wished tonight...._  
  
 **SUICIDE SLUMS, six Hours later:**  
  
The Boom Tube opened with a crackling and eerie sound, disgorging Kalibak and Steppenwolf.  
  
"You're sure about this?"  
  
Kalibak snorted.  
  
"I'm sure. The appearance of Goronn confirms it. Trigon's Gem is here on Earth."  
  
He grinned savagely.  
  
"Won't old Four Eyes be so disappointed when we confiscate his Gem? Imagine what purposes we could put the Gem to for my Father."  
  
Steppenwolf snorted. "Ah, Kalibak Your quest will always end in dis-"  
  
Both of them stopped cold when they realized how wrong the stars had been around the Earth and for how long they'd been thus. Screams were present across the planet, and the first wave of mass suicides and homicides to follow the manifestation of the monster followed in its train. Then the stars resumed a seemingly normal appearance and their caution for a moment was dispelled.....right as a sickly green rift formed in the vicinity of Metropolis, and a towering twenty-five foot thing in dark green armor manifested, even as its second avatar was at work in the Himalayan mountains. Much to do, deeper plans afoot. Perhaps by far the greatest expansion of its existence thus far, and battles enough to satiate its lust.

Such was the nature of the Undying Flame that even two of the New Gods, the hunter and the most mighty of them in brute physical terms, stopped for a minute. It wasn't the sheer size of the thing, both had seen bigger and stranger things. Nor the raw physicality of her psychic presence. Two who had seen and interacted with each of the seven Endless in a different fashion would never see anything unusual here. It was the roiling sense of malice, of a psychic flaying power that was more damaging than that of Darkseid, God of Tyranny, of their own souls flayed as callously as the victims of Granny Goodness in her pleasure-pits. Kalibak cracked his knuckles and stepped forward as Steppenwolf raised an axe that glowed with runes of power.   
  
They both stopped cold when the creature began to speak…


	6. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin

_**SUICIDE SLUMS:** _

The creature spoke with a resonant voice that to mortals would have shaken their bones and souls. To the New Gods it was the voice of something from Beyond, a concept that to entities of that nature themselves horrified them by the sheer reaction akin to that of mere squishy mortals, something that should have been beneath them. Recognizing this even the brash Kalibak stopped for a moment.

The creature's first words might as well have been gibberish to Kalibak but brought Steppenwolf up short:

_**I am come to light a fire in these worlds and even now it is kindled. I am the Undying Flame, the Azar of Azarath in her true aspect, a flame to sear the demon Trigon and banish him and all his works into eternity. Mine is the lightning flash, mine are the hands that heal, mine are the hands that kill. Mine are the hands that still the wine-dark sea.** _

The monster laughed.

_**Mine the hands that hung the stars in their courses, mine the hands that turned the world of ashes into the Citadel of the Temple Azarath. Mine the will that gave some of its weaker scions thrice their greatest dream and took it from them when it would have been of most use. Mine the hands that instilled the cult of Zezhelanzunui and the Undying Flame amongst those still human, to turn the fires of peace and righteousness into the hellfire of damnation and folly.** _

It looked at them.

_**I play with entire universes as my assertion of willpower, your father, O Kalibak, can barely master a planet of scheming servile buffoons who exist purely to reflect his glory. I am to you what you deem yourself to mortals. That something like you seeks to disrupt them is an act of simple-minded brutality against a mind that sets stars to burn.** _

The entity then hovered slightly in the skies, and they got a good look at her in the streetlights of the human city, bolstered by their godly vision. Twenty-five feet tall and with a bulk and mass equal to her height, giving her the impression of being from five to twenty times larger than she was, the most bizarre aspect the dish-like face with massive jaws, blue crystalline eyes holding them spellbound.

_**You seek to disrupt schemes that drove the Gem from one of my many plans with her and her parallels across dimensions. None shall disrupt my will, be they the mortal maggots that infest the Earth or the Gods that humanity has made in their image and in their likeness.** _

The entity calmly hovered over to them.

_**Even if I did not intervene, Trigon would protect his own Gem. I would rather telegraph my motivations when I myself take on the Justice League. And that means no Gods deciding to step in. Children should not seek to toy with the plans and designs of your masters.** _

A Boomtube opened behind her and the Azar calmly turned with a deliberate slowness.

Metron, seated upon his Moebius chair, glared down at her.

"It is not your place to take from Kalibak or Steppenwolf their appointed fates."

The Azar laughed with a booming sound.

_**Kill them? I have no desire to be so…..direct. Their father must learn a lesson or two to remind him that a God he may be, but one who cannot fully master a planet should not seek to antagonize them who master entire dimensions. I will not kill them, Metron. But do not give me a reason to seek you.** _

Even as she laughed with an eldritch sound, Kalibak slammed into her, tackling her and throwing her on her face as he smashed her face repeatedly into the ground. Metron shook his head and disappeared, deciding that it would be time now to draw in Highfather and Darkseid to a common aim.

If what he suspected was right, their intervention would be needed to stave off the Spectre and a still greater mess. Or…he thought. No, killing the Gem would not do anything but bring Trigon in earlier when he would bulldoze a universe incapable of expecting him. The Prophecy would be null and void, to be sure, but in the sense of giving Trigon what he wanted.

The entity he'd seen, however, possessed the actual power to follow through with the madness that coursed through her. She was at least on par with the Anti-Monitor, and he knew enough to know that invoking some forces, even for Gods, was a risk not worth taking. But they were the Gods, and if it fell to anyone to stop what he foresaw, it would be them and perhaps the Olympians and Norse Gods.

It would need all of them.

Kalibak was shocked when the Azar simply flexed and hurled him off of her, before catching the punch thrown by his uncle Steppenwolf with one hand.

She grinned and then hurled him over her back as he landed with a groaning sound and a tremendous crack that left a gigantic crater to her own pleasure and amusement.

Kalibak roared:

"I am a God, you dull creature, I will not be bullied by"-the Azar picked him up and then smashed him like a metronomic ragdoll, laughing as she hurled him with sufficient force that he groaned, unconscious.

Steppenwolf rose to his feet and then lunged at her only for her to casually freeze him in mid-air with a thought and favor him with an unnaturally large-scale smile.

_**I've already seen what the heroes can do against me. It was not impressive.** _

As Kalibak regained consciousness, he saw the boots of the monster and heard her speaking to his uncle.

_**They're too uptight to do anything about this Gem, and I for one intend to see what can happen when I begin my experiments with what a walking portal can do. Trigon is so unimaginative, really, with his portals.** _

She smiled as she then prepared to deal Steppenwolf a blow to knock him unconscious only for Kalibak to grab her ankles and tug, causing her to slam into the ground with a sudden degree of shock, followed by Kalibak's rapid blows that soon began to have a telling effect. Grinning, he pulled both of his hands together and raised them in a set of lightning strikes to the Azar's armor, smiling when he succeeded with a tremendous boom in dealing a crack to her breastplate that split it straight down the middle.

The Azar's eyes widened and then Kalibak grinned as he suddenly moved with a speed that something of his unnatural weight and build should not have been able to do and started repeatedly smashing the Azar in the face. He grinned as his fists kept smacking into her to a point that he heard some satisfying crashes and cracking sounds, and blood began to flow from her nose and mouth, while her face began to cave in somewhat.

Smiling after he withdrew his fist from her face, he then grabbed the Azar by the arm and raised it over his knee and slammed it down on it with a crashing sound that ended up breaking her arm, and then smiling further when he lifted her up and slammed her into the ground several times, leaving her groaning and bleeding.

"I am the strongest being on Apokilips, you arrogant little-"

The monster blinked. This entity had done something few other than the Spectre managed in universes like this. Actually more than the Spectre due to lacking the specific limits on the Spirit of Vengeance. It broke her arm, had caved in part of her face, and had actually cracked her armor, a feat that even Deborah seldom managed in their brawls. This last bit genuinely surprised her, and it was followed by Kalibak smashing his foot into her stomach, cracking the armor a second time as he laughed again, and then kicked her again, slamming her into a building that exploded with the impact.

Lunging forward, Kalibak raised her out of the crumbled building, grinning as he then said, "What's the matter, Azar? Afraid of the dark?"

_**JUMP CITY:** _

After the incident with the HIVE it had been a quiet time for the Teen Titans. Supergirl's presence plus increased training meant the team was sufficient deterrent for most crime caused by any reason other than poverty, and it was Starfire's suggestion that the team at least try to do what they could to help out with this factor by protecting the poor.

That all came to a crashing end when the George Perez Bank was broken into by a giggling madman with a black and white themed costume. Arthur Light was a supervillain who'd fallen on hard times. Once seen as a great threat to all, including the Justice League, he'd had a strange memory gap he'd never quite filled and since then his effectiveness had declined. His last loss, where he was beaten by Green Arrow, offended him enough that he decided he'd go to Jump City. Maybe if he started winning fights for a change he could fix his own issues.

It had been satisfyingly easy to break into the vault in the bank and secure in his getaway car both cash and gold ingots. When he'd gone back the second time, he sighed.

"Well well, if it isn't Robin's Bush League of America." He cackled as he said, "I am the great Doctor Light. Master of Illumination!"

"You're going to go to prison quietly or we make you. Titans Go!"

The team lunged at Dr. Light as one, save Supergirl who quietly made sure that any civilians standing around gawping like idiots were gotten out of the way via carefully managed applications of super-speed, but even then some people whimpered from whiplash and two people lost their lunch. Shrugging, Supergirl rushed back to a genuinely surprising scene.

Beast Boy was on the ground clutching his stomach, which clearly looked burned. Starfire was unconscious on the second floor of the bank, and had been clearly blasted by….something. Robin and Cyborg were in a heap together with both of them knocked out and she wasn't sure who'd hit what.

Dr. Light smiled.

"Well then. The Girl of Steel. Your cousin's been a bit of a problem. But you? You're a girl." As he looked up at Starfire with a leer he said, "And girls have a very specific…place." He cackled and then unleashed a full-scale set of blasts that hit Supergirl. Not knowing what to expect, Supergirl was shocked when she realized that the idiot was hitting her with the equivalent of yellow sunlight, basically giving her a power boost thinking he was hurting her.

Favoring him with a more than somewhat sinister smile, Supergirl began to walk toward him as he kept blasting her, saying "Oh come on!"

She then laughed again as she said "It's yellow radiation, police car boy."

As he suddenly turned very pale she scanned him with X-ray vision and found the power source for his suit, and then in a sudden blur levitated him upward and crunched it with that same quasi-sinister smile. As the rest of the team woke up and began to drag themselves to their feet, she dropped Light none too gently and then bent over, looking him square in the eyes.

"So, to repeat what Robin said, are we going to do this the easy way or the hard way?"

Dr. Light whimpered "E-e-e—easy way."

She smiled. "Good boy."

_**SUICIDE SLUM:** _

The Azar growled and then was slammed into the ground as the brute force of Kalibak smashed her again, his fist smashing into her pauldron with sufficient force to not only crack it but deal it a spiderweb blow. With that he resumed the jackhammers to her face until the Azar-entity as a whole belatedly realized that while in theory it outweighed individual deities, detachment against the wrong foe was a good route to get herself disembodied and have to recreate an avatar in a sense that was not needed. The Cuckoo in the Himalayas had been forged, the master key to the greater scheme in any event, so now......

The entity suddenly roared with a primordial foghorn-like roar that rocked Kalibak backwards, Steppenwolf still immobilized by the broader use of her powers. Raising herself to her feet, the entity's wounds were replaced by a seeming vista of the material fabric of space, the entity restoring herself to full normality, the armor likewise sealing. 

The entity levitated again and glared at Kalibak.

_**You, O Kalibak, have been given this verdict. You have been weighed on the balance scales and found wanting.** _

The entity then lunged at Kalibak and struck with a blow that was more than physical and operated at all possible levels for a sledgehammer strike to hit, and at these levels the raw brute strength of Kalibak the Cruel was useless. With a deep groan he fell unconscious and then the entity, seething at her being easily bested, decided to simply leave him there and after unfreezing Steppenwolf, walked over to him and dealt him a blow of such overpowering nature that it pulped his ribs and several of his internal organs, leaving them unconscious for Superman to find them.

She hissed again. No, this wouldn't do. If a God could manhandle her and actually do some serious damage, then she'd have no choice but to play more carefully in a multiverse where these things were fixtures across them. They could not stop her, but there was a point where enjoyment of a battle did not equal simple masochism for its own sake. No games with the League, not now. After all, they usually easily defeated this Kalibak and she'd had to put far far more effort into a fistfight than she'd ever had to do. No…

She growled. Ah, well. She was an immortal entity who'd absorbed entire universes. What was a few hours and days to revise a plan to actually deal with mortals? She vanished into acrid smoke and a green crackling lightning just as Superman arrived and scratched his head. A significant part of Suicide Slum, fortunately empty because this was a derelict place shunned even by the homeless, looked like a war-zone.

Then he looked at who precisely had featured there and he was stunned. Two of Darkseid's minions…he looked around. No Parademons. Just Kalibak, who looked like Hell, and Steppenwolf, who looked like he'd been run over.

Then Steppenwolf coughed and spoke three words that set in motion events none could have foreseen: "Help us, Superman."


	7. Blood and Fire

_**Gotham City, Church of Blood:** _

It was an old and haunted place, not touched since the day that the Demon Trigon, one of the many faces of Angra Mainyu the Unholy One had perpetrated his dark act. It was where his Gem was forged in fire and sword, giving him the Power to unlock countless dimensions though naturally so simple-minded a beast as he would think of such power with one world. To be fair it was the center of the local multiverse and conquering it would be a bridgehead. So naturally better to pre-empt him.

Such were the thoughts of a monstrous entity that formed out of a sickly green light that left an acrid odor, fresh from the small war with two of the New Gods in Metropolis. Towering over the one-story derelict building but casting no shadow, as her dark green armor seemed to reflect and absorb light in a fashion that no metal could or should, she strode toward the building, footsteps echoing in Gotham like the coming of a colossus and in truth they were.

The derelict place was rotted, moonlight shining through holes in its roof, a place of corruption and filth befouled by the touch of Angra Mainyu. She paused before the ruins, seeing the runes of protection he'd placed to seal his secrets. Her eyes glowed and a sinister smile broke out as she raised one of her gauntlets, rings glowing in fire and then her Power surged out against the Runes that flared into existence.

A Voice began to incant in the high and ancient language of the Urhalzantrani, the race of New Ones remade immortal and born again in Power and Glory, overlain with infrasound-like hints of a second and darker language of unhallowed and ancient places marked with the odor and sense of decay, a rotting meat smell. The Runes flared and then collapsed in a billowing cloud of smoke and the entity smiled triumphantly as she then strode across the threshold, her weight smashing down the outer frame of the building, as it semeed to crumble and implode before her.

In Zandia, Brother Blood rose with glowing energy coursing through his body and then was hurled headlong in force, landing on his face with a muffled scream of agony. Gotham. Not Jump City, fortunately. His HIVE Academy was coming along splendidly, especially with Deathstroke's quest. But….Gotham. His eyes widened. That place. Where He'd come. The dark God his cult revered in truth, author of the Bible of Crime.

The entity behind the legends of the Slanderer and the Adversary translated as Diabolus, the Devil. Malebolge-King. Trigon the Terrible, master of countless universes. Summoned by an Acolyte who alone had survived the massacre that followed Trigon's taking the youthful woman Angela Roth, forcing himself upon her and when she'd fled, casually destroying those whom he desired destroyed and sending him to inform the newly-crowned Brother Blood still soaked in the blood of his father of the rise of the Gem.

Now he was here. The darkness had changed, it had become that much more smothering. The billowing smoke and explosion would attract others, he knew. That damned furry with his bat-fetish, a lunatic barely superior to the more murderous lunatics he contested. Indeed the brilliant image of a Bat shown in the sky in the wake of the thunderous explosion. But his Master called and when Trigon said to go forth, so one went.

Gathering to him his mantle, Brother Blood strode into the Church. The derelict place was dark, though his Trigon-enhanced senses showed him the altar with the monstrous depiction of the Demon, a massive creature with gigantic horns and four eyes and cloven feet. Muscles rasped of something immense and invisible, carnosaur-like breathing rumbled in the darkness. He snarled.

"Who dares defile this sacred place?"

A voice rumbled out, infrasound-enhanced, partially human but with the overlay of something…..else. Something whose non-human aspects were in the resonant and echoing aspects, in the psychic flaying that smashed through the Trigon-gifted mantle as though it were nothing. In the vaguely-hinted motion in the shadows.

The cleric hissed. "This is a holy place you half-human monstrosity. You defile it by your presence."

The darkness suddenly collapsed and Brother Blood fell to his knees at the giant revealed, a figure with a blue hood concealing one half of her face and a mask the other half. This was what had spoken to him in rumbling power in the darkness.

_**A place dedicated to Angra Mainyu, to Skath, is no holy place, false-priest.** _

A booming footstep followed and the entire Church shook, and he understood all too well the rubble covering the floor and why the stars shone down on the building and only then did he question how that did not contradict the sheer unrelenting darkness, the being stepping toward him with a deliberately mocking slowness, face marked with an unnaturally wide grin.

_**The Undying Flame is upon you**_ , a gauntlet caressed the altar with mocking affection, _**and this citadel-temple of Hell shall be an offering by fear, pleasing in the nostrils of the Outer Light.**_

His eyes widened. "Aza-" and then a brilliant and terrible light surged with the terrible brightness of a second Sun and he had no time to scream.

The former Church erupted in a massive fireball that illuminated the appearance of the monstrous creature and exposed two people, a man in a Bat-outfit and a boy in a traffic-light worthy of derision in one sense save that this child, Jason Todd, was a heroic figure striving hard to measure up to the legacy of Richard Grayson, now the leader of his own team. The monster illuminated smiled.

He had tried to hide his secrets but the Demon had shown her the truth. The Hand of Glory, beneath Jump City in an under-temple. Built in a place where in the days before the white man came to California the locals had reportedly met and exorcised a strange beast that the Catholic Priests had called El Diablo and which the first white settlers, disregarding the legend and exploring the cave, had been eaten in large numbers until a set of soldiers went in and one came out aged and white-haired.

So it was that city, then. Not the one of the Man of Steel nor the one of the Dark Knight. Stepping out with those thunderous steps, the creature then paused. It was a clear moonlit night but it did not need the light to see Bruce Wayne and Jason Todd coming up toward it. Wayne had a green glowing rock. The creature snorted, and then rose to her full massive height.

While both were shocked at the sheer size and nature of what was revealed, it was Jason who briefly coughed in shock.

_**Ill met by moonlight, proud Batman.** _

The creature laughed, and then cocked her head.

_**I am no child of Krypton to be deterred by the detritus of a dead world, by a poison set in motion by Skath the Unholy. Mine the hands that hung the Stars themselves and I have set in motion great and wonderful things. There is nothing you can do against me, spawn of evil, scourge of night.** _

It was then that Bruce Wayne and Jason backed up slightly. A shambling figure strode toward her.

"Batman….Batman, my skin is sick." A slopping voice, the echoing decaying odor of Clayface. "Batman, Batman, I want," and then he saw the monster whose voice had seemed out of Crane's visions.

He gasped, "God…"

_**The Outer Light, First and Last, Who holds the Keys of Hell and of Death. Not as you'd understand that term but….close enough.** _

With a sinister smile the entity strode over to Clayface and removed her gauntlet, then grasped him by the face. A pulse of light and the illness faded and Clayface fell to his knees, screaming in agony as a searing flame cleansed the illness from him, glowing with brightness as the Azar began to stride off. Hurled Bat-a-Rangs were casually frozen in mid-air and then the entity crunched them into dust and began to open a portal of sickly green light.

It smiled. _**A child consumed by his own fears seeking to unleash fear in turn, and you….you cannot fight a God who consumes countless universes.**_

She stepped into the light and vanished as the sickly green light slowly dimmed and the odor remained. Batman and Robin moved cautiously to the man who was once Clayface, only for him to raise his flesh, where glowing yellow veins were visible and his mouth emanated a new light. He spoke in a creaking rumble:

_**All are one in the Azar.** _

He broke out in a slasher's grin and leaped upward into the sky, leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Bruce cursed. "I have to call in Clark with this one."

_**JUMP CITY:** _

Kara Zor-El smiled as she flew in a brilliant morning light. It was times like this that she cherished most her gifts. Times of wonder, and of splendor. Then she saw a woman careening through the atmosphere, the flames of entry around her and burning into the outfit she wore but she herself unharmed. She was followed by two probes. Not hesitating in the slightest, she hurled upward with a blinding speed and then the probes stopped.

They spoke in an intergalactic patois:

" _We seek to retain the criminal Komand'r of Tamaran_."

Kara blinked. Tamaran? One of Starfire's people? Impulsive actions she would regret later followed when she made a snap decision and blasted the probes to ruin with her heat vision. The woman, managing to arrest her own fall rose with parts of her uniform burned off, exposing a shapely body very much like Starfire's.

Her eyes widened and then she zoomed toward the city leaving Supergirl confused. That woman could have been Starfire's twin, save that her eyes blazed purple where Star's were always a brilliant green, and that she left a trail of darkness where the other left a strand of fire beautiful and terrible as the dawn. Flying back to Titans Tower, she landed there to meet Starfire, who stared with jaw gaping at someone she introduced as "my sister Blackfire."

As Kara landed, Blackfire's eyes bugged out and she said in Tamaranean: " _I thought the Kryptonians were all extinct except one._ " Starfire shook her head and said " _No, there are others_." " _Obviously_."

Then in English she greeted Supergirl with a smile and a "Hello, I am Blackfire. A pleasure to make your acquaintance…Supergirl." She offered her hand. Eyebrow raised, Supergirl shook it, wondering what all this was going to lead to….then she looked up, hearing the crackling of that strange energy she'd heard several times. Metropolis, Gotham. Now here. Was it connected?

_**THE CITADEL OF SKATH, BENEATH THE JUMP CITY LIBRARY:** _

The monster smiled as she hovered at its edge. Now here were runes of potency sufficient to ward her out for a short time. No matter. She knew where what she was seeking for was located for certain. The crackling light formed again and she vanished.


	8. Sisters and Dreamscapes

**THE LAND OF DREAMS:**

It was that dream again. Her most frequent nightmare. The End had come, her Father had transformed the world in his image and in his likeness. The Titans and the League came together, put her in a room sealed by Fate and Zatanna with wards. Four eyes had manifested on the wall across from it and contemptuous thunderclaps of laughter followed and four beams ripped the wards asunder. Her glowing burning body levitated against her will and followed, seeing the teams fighting in vain against a horde of flaming entities, hearing the pained screams of J'onn and M'gann over all the rest.

Seeing Superman at war with Goronn and thrown back casually with a backhand as the entity broke Wonder Woman's back over his knee like a twig and then slammed her again and broke her in two, the woman crumbling into dust. Then levitating against her will, jaw taught and unable to scream as it wished and the words that would doom the multiverse: _The Gem is born of evil's fire, the Gem shall be his portal. He comes to claim, he comes to Sire, the end of all things Mortal._

Then light and it was over, except it wasn't. The Malebolge was manifest now on Earth and the immaterial and ephemeral forms of demons attained a solidity to rival the inhabitants of Earth, and Earth fell in fire and fury, inhabitants remade into ever-screaming stone, their souls entrapped within. She'd broken out with white energy, pure-white. It had seared through her prison and the monstrous guardian of the gates that kept her in.

She ran. A giant towered over the ruins that were once Jump City, like in some of Gar's favorite movies, or the monster Gamera that the League had run into on several occasions or the equally shadowy leviathan that lurked within the waters of the Pacific, a God that was spoken of with fear and trembling. But it was no reptile. It was a colossus with vast and twisted horns, and cloven feet. A being of Chaos rewritten and tortured by himself into becoming a Lord of Order, if an evil one.

Those thunderous footsteps, the giant chasing her.

**You cannot hide from your destiny, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. You have delivered me this world and you shall become my co-ruler, master of my worlds, first of all your kin, eldest and daughter of my own will.**

"NEVER."

As always she tripped and He came around the corner, the rough beast slouching toward Bethelem to be born. She screamed-

And awoke in her bed in her apartment, one of several she had. This one was in Gotham, and it was fortunate that Zatanna had put the runes on her things or it would have been destroyed. She blinked her four-tears fell as she realized that in her scream she'd manifested the traits of her father's lineage and tears flowed down her cheeks and as two eyes replaced four she fell asleep.

This time the dream was new.

Again it was Jump City, which fit. Her father had built his Nexus there a long time ago, but it wasn't him. Not like this. Much of the city was waterlogged, buildings soaked and flooded. The burning hulk of the Watchtower was still visible where it had fallen, and Titans Tower, far from being her father's throne was a smouldering ruin.

In an incredible sight, the forces of New Genesis, Apokilips, Warworld, Brainiac, Oa, and Atlantis were working together with the League against the implacable armored enemy that easily withstood their blows, working in perfect unity. Great clanking beetles in plate armor emblazoned with a dragon, shouting:

_I nishi-Azarath! Zezhelanzunui!_

She coughed. She'd fallen and was incredibly unharmed by the fall from a great height when hit by a force she couldn't see and there had been a massive explosion followed by hurling Superman and Darkseid into a careening distance, and the incredible and unexpected sight of the monster Gamera overcome by a blurred insect that struggled for a time and then smashed the monster down, its upside-down shell visible.

A being moved within the flames, immense and oversized and seemingly swollen, a great cape with armor and massive gauntlets visible, half its face hidden within a hood. The being casually strode with thunderous steps that rivaled those of Gamera despite being a mere twenty feet tall against an eighty meter turtle-like thing. Mere. Right. Carnosaur breathing, a low and rumbling continual hiss, eyes that burned like suns. Muscles that rasped with each step and each thunderous footfall and with gauntleted hands clenching as the beast smiled with that inhuman shark-leer.

_**Your world has fallen.** _That voice. Her eyes widened. She'd heard it before in another dream. **_Your world has fallen and it is mine to inherit now. Soon, I shall extend my power across time and space, and an entire multiverse fall to me as on a whim. I contend at the very highest levels of reality, Gem of Skath. The spell he has placed upon you is one with a great many facets even he would not dare to master._**

The creature towered over her and then grasped her with a gauntleted hand that raised her to the point where her glowing white eyes stared into two massive burning suns in a dish-like face.

_**I master it, as I have mastered this world. Even now the forces from the stars shall begin to retreat as the portals of the Empire of Azarath open**_. The gauntlet opened and she fell, coughing from smoke inhalation, the entity crossing her arms.

The creature leaned forward and lifted her head. _**All are one in the Azar**_. As she spoke Raven screamed and began to rise and to glow and seemed to become Someone-no, Something else. The Gem. A being beyond time and space, able to know all and to see all and to be all. The Azar smiled-and she awoke again. This time her eyes were still two and she trembled.

A new nightmare. As with the other it was partially fear, partially prophetic. What manner of being was that in her dreams?

She decided even though it was midnight she'd slept enough and then turned on the TV, watching to her surprise pictures of Starfire fighting another Tamaranean and two Centauri in Jump City, Supergirl keeping the Centauri busy and glaring at Blackfire. When Blackfire hurled Starfire at her, Raven slid into her leotard, and teleported to Jump City.

**HOURS EARLIER, TITANS TOWER** :

Blackfire had smiled at the ease with which she'd captivated the men in the Tower. She had everything her sister had. Surreptitiously looking around and then giving one of her breasts a squeeze she smiled again. Yes, everything. But she was more easily able to adapt to Earth and to getting along with them. She'd raised an eyebrow or two at Starfire's manners, wondering what precisely had happened to the brutal and effective warlord that had trained with her at Okaara, way back when, and who'd broken out of the Gordanians' clutches.

There was always something false about her, but with her the pretense of interest was likewise a pretense but a much more smooth one. There was one real problem and her occasional stammers and rapid heartbeats didn't help her. The Kryptonian female. As far as she'd known there was all of one Kryptonian left in the entire universe, the Superman of Metropolis. Now here was a golden-haired blue-eyed goddess from the stars.

Not much could scare someone used to the harshness and splendor of Vega and of Tameran, but Kryptonians did. One of the few beings beyond the Demon Trigon and his minions to easily be able to tear Tameranians limb from limb, masters of technology without equal. And yet their world blew up so how much of a threat were they really? All the same she felt she was being watched by the Kryptonian, and it was as much to break up this tension as anything else that she'd suggested they go clubbing.

That and the Centauri following her would lose her. Supergirl, however, saw the Centauri and managed to pull one of them aside.

She rolled her eyes when one of them said "Kryptonian? I thought there was only one of you left?"

"If I had a dime for every time someone said that," she grumbled. "No. I want to know why you're following us. What interest do the Centauri have with the Teen Titans?"

"Not all of you, Koriand'r."

"Huh?" Her eyes widened.

"She has a long and lengthy rap sheet of offenses committed on various worlds, several in the last months."

The last thing he expected was for Supergirl to begin laughing. "No. No. That wasn't her."

"No offense, lady of the House of El, how can you tell that?"

"Because she's been here all along. This is a frame job. Let me show you."

Pointing to an image of 'Starfire', she maneuvered her arm at super-speed and the in hindsight rather crude and alarmingly yet able to deceive the police black ink fell off.

"Huh."

"Yeah. I think that it's time we paid this Blackfire a little visit." Levitating up, she landed at the nightclub and stepped inside. Beast Boy and Cyborg were having fun dancing with the ladies, Victor more suave than the deliberately goofy Garfield, while Robin/Richard was dancing with Blackfire and Starfire. It was when a point happened that Blackfire stopped, then started tapping her foot, then fumed and turned to Kara, who gave her a cryptic smile.

Snarling her eyes glowed and she hurled a starbolt at the Kryptonian, who tanked it and shielded the suddenly silenced crowd that began to panic.

"Glorg borger! I wanted that hak'tal b'ktrr in prison!"

"Sister?"

Blackfire turned to her. "Always the better of us in our parents' favor, then in Galfore. Always looking after Blackfire the cripple, Blackfire the flightless." She hissed. "You looked after me so much, dear sister, I wanted to return to you the favor. Your looking after me gave me flight from the Citadel. But this bitch," and she fired another Starbolt Supergirl tanked and then as her narrowed eyes began to burn and she levitated "spoiled that."

She then lunged at Starfire. "I am always the better of us, cripple or not. And I will show you how much better." She blasted them clean through the nightclub, an eruption of thunder and showering brick and splintered glass, and as the Titans watched Starfire clashing with Blackfire in a sudden blur of starbolts and screaming in Tamaranean, Supergirl stopped them.

"She has to do this herself." She gave a rather more sinister smile. "I believe it is entirely within her ability to do so." As Blackfire struggled, Starfire smiled. Her sister wasn't that used to flying, not yet. Grasping her in a chokehold she flew up into the skies, only for Blackfire to curl her leg back and hit her between her legs. Squeaking and clutching at herself, she dropped Blackfire who fell with a scream and then with a sickly grin remembered she could fly and swooped back upward.

Blackfire was astonished when the seemingly naïve and charming sister she'd believed in let the mask slip. In her place was the beserker Koriand'r she knew. And with a chill she realized that this was still a Koriand'r who was entirely happy to kill. Indeed a sheer volley of beams aimed straight at her chest with intent to ventilate her and dodged purely by her superior speed and reflexes were all that saved her.

It was then that the Centauri swooped in to try to catch her in a trap and as she dodged it, and Starfire likewise barely dodged it, a crackling white energy loop with dark energy around it disclosed the body of one of the newest members of the Justice League. Raven. For a moment Blackfire paused in mid-fight, seeing glowing energy on Raven's body. Her eyes widened in brief recognition of the marks of the Gem and realizing what she'd seen, Raven glared. With that suddenly a shockwave followed as a column of black energy with crackling white barriers hit her toward her sister, who caught her and with a pile-driver that stunned her not least from the erroneous belief that her soft sister couldn't hit hard she fell again. Landing with a crater, she was shocked when her sister straddled her.

Trying for a joke she said "Oh come on, that's a bit unsist-" and then her head slammed into the ground in a blurred motion that left an increasing spider-web of craters and Starfire smiled when she was unconscious, and then let the Centauri put her in shackles. As Blackfire woke up, Starfire smiled. " _You may be stronger and faster but I'm always smarter_ ," she said sweetly in Tamaranean. " _I learned one true rule from Okaara. Know your enemy and do whatever is necessary to bring it down. Get off of my new world_."

Smiling sweetly she said "Oh hello, most glorious of friends." Their jaws were open and they were sweatdropping in a fashion that reflected awe, and even Supergirl's own jaw was more than slightly open.

The team went off back to the tower, and Starfire smiled and then mouthed "Thank you" to Raven, who gave her a slightly cryptic nod and then teleported back to her apartment.

The next day was an entirely calm one in Jump City, and this time Raven, though a member of the League, had no tasks calling for her attention or monitor duty. Heading down to Jump City, she smiled again barely and cryptically when she saw the Titans.

"Hey guys. Mind if I join you for a day?"

They smiled in turn to welcome her.

_**THE WATCHTOWER:** _

Steppenwolf breathed a deep sigh of relief when Kalibak finally awoke from the coma that strange armored monster had put him in. Gritting his teeth at a kind of politeness he did not in truth feel, he turned to Dr. Midnight and said "My thanks, mortal. You saved his life."

Then he turned to the Justice League. "Superman," smiling and unable to resist getting in one dig even if he realized he did need his help "Superfriends," he sighed. "We do need your help and now that he's awake and able to give his own side of it, we owe you an explanation." He then picked up a piece of chipped green armor that had come off the breastplate, a head of a dragon visible and moving in spite of its broken-off nature.

"This is the only bit that he"-as he pointed to Kalibak "left behind of our assailant before she teleported away."

Wonder Woman raised an eyebrow. "She?"

"Yes, she."

He said "You might want to sit down. It's a long story. And is your newest member here?"

They looked around. "No, I believe she went for an off day."

"She needs to be here. What happened to us concerns her."

Relaxing with Starfire as she meditated, Raven received a message on her Comm. The League. "Sorry guys, I gotta go." As the Titans waved, she said "I hope I'll be able to come back. The Tower….." she smiled genuinely, "it feels like home. Family." Crackling white light with a black center followed and she vanished.

Seeing Steppenwolf and Kalibak in the Watchtower infirmary her jaw dropped. Not least when Steppenwolf said "Good. She's here now. And now for that explanation I owe you….."


	9. I Come Not to Bring Peace but a Sword

**The Watchtower, Interrogation Room:**

In hindsight the thing that probably should have alarmed them most, in the wake of what was to come, in the wake of the terrifying crisis that began to arise within the multiverse, was a pair of subtle and simple things. Here were two Gods of Apokilips, foes of great strength and overwhelming power. Among the few foes that could wade into Superman, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter and more than simply outmatch them all with overwhelming force.

Here was the dread Kalibak, who for all his weaknesses as a foe had great and tremendous strength, perhaps the most mighty being in all creation if capable of little else. And here the sinister and cunning Steppenwolf, and that simple and subtle thing was a haunted tone of voice. Fear. Not that of Darkseid, the comforting and familiar fear of living under a dark and unhallowed master who casually slew His servants, that of a raw and primordial fear akin to that of mortals.

"I presume you all know of the multiverse?"

Most of them nodded, Raven doing so a bit later with an eyebrow raised. Steppenwolf saw it.

"The multiverse we live in is one of multiple overlapping worlds. A simple thing changes, this and that, and we live in different worlds. The center of our multiverse is Earth, though Oa is the center of each individual universe. That, then, is why what is coming wants the Earth." He laughed with a morbid and a dark sound, and then continued.

"And how many of you know our multiverse is not alone of its kind?"

Only Wonder Woman and Aquaman's eyes narrowed and Steppenwolf smiled with a vicious grin, and Raven's own eyes widened, as did the rest of the League. Batman actually straightened himself and calmed himself with a micro-expression shadowing his face, while Superman contented himself merely to raise an eyebrow, a skeptical expression to the promises and words of Dark Gods.

"All that is or will ever be is what is called the Omniverse. There are worlds like ours, where men develop the power to shatter steel with their bare hands, to fly, to give into the raw power of emotions and become heroes. There are worlds where these things, and the various races among the sure and silvery stars are but stories and songs. And there are worlds," and his voice shifted to a truly haunted sense "where multiversal singularities are the root and the offspring of the great and the fantastic. These singularities were great, once."

When the Father Box displayed symbology, only Raven and Zatanna stirred at the symbols though the children of the Old Gods flinched, knowing precisely what they meant. A symbol of a creature tall and inhuman with a strange tendril-like body, multiple eyes clustered and a vertical mouth fanged with teeth, on countless tendrils. A man's body with a dragon's wings and an octopoid head, six eyes in two clusters of three. Said body more than slightly chubby with the wings vast and broad and the tendrils of the head on the beast's knees. An ewe, or perhaps a ram, with thousands of offspring suckling at monstrous teats.

Beyond them all drummers and flautists, and the sight of them produced in all of them, even the Gods and Their servants and in Raven as well the brief sound-sensation of a cracked flute whining in a maddening sound like the demented wings of a fly and a drum rumbling like peals of thunder, and…. Something…beyond that writhed in endless sleep.

"These are singularities that exist in all universes in some form or other. Perhaps not by the names with which they are most commonly noted in the old Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth cycles but they are there and they are the true masters of the multiverse. They have fallen, however, into dreaming death and nothing can awaken them until the stars are right. How the stars shifted is unknown, but fragmentary records indicate-"

Raven whispered "A monster sought access into the realm of the Gods to overthrow them and become the new author of reality. And in the process he was cast down into the abyss of dreaming death and the age of legends died, the monsters gone with them."

Steppenwolf raised an eyebrow. "There are many books in the libraries of Azarath, Hunter."

His eyes widened in turn. "Azarath?"

"Yes. A realm of pacific monks who taught me how to control my powers, to contain them."

He nodded, uneasily, and the reason why became directly obvious when the next bit followed. The Father box showed an image, one simultaneously familiar and yet unfamiliar. A vast and overbuilt woman-like figure with a dish-like face and a light blue cape clad in dark green plate armor. Her lower jaw was concealed behind a half-helm, only a small part of her light pink skin visible while her crystalline blue eyes were visible and seemed to burn with intensity beyond reckoning. She hovered in the depths of space, cape moving in an unnatural wind, eyes starting to burn like stars.

"A legend, we were told. Children of a New Elder One, as paradoxical as that sounds. A Warlord in a distant dimension who ascended to divine power and forged a multiversal empire beginning with grand and terrible Wars of Unification in his own world. The first beings of a category not seen since the Stars changed and dread Cthulhu and his ilk slumped into slumbering death, awaiting the time when the Stars are Right."

Steppenwolf's voice was haunted.

"This one is the Undying Flame, ruler of the Land of Everlasting Fire, the Great Mother-God from whom countless universes know a kind of everlasting peace, sacred dreams befouled."

Then he looked at Raven directly and she froze as he spoke the next words: "She uses a term from an older form of a human language meaning Fire. Azar. And a simplified version of the realm she rules and is is Azarath."

Raven blinked. "That was not the Azarath I was taught in by the monks."

He nodded with an almost greasy kind of conciliatory near-sorrow, the figure in the Mother-Box coming up against a Daxamite spaceship. Flying and maneuvering in the vacuum of space, not a hint of cold or its effects upon her. Perfect maneuver in the void,something that should not have been. The ship tore open, dying in a soundless eruption, fire and bodies plunged outward, the monster laughing and yet in a soundless void there was sound.

At that everyone leaned forward.

"This entity claims to be the true Azarath from which all versions of the Cult of Azar spring in different universes. An ideal of peace and serenity, God made manifest, brave and bold and terrible as the dawn in an endless starless night. The Undying Flame of immortality, according to the Book of the Unspeakable Cults."

Raven leaned forward. "I read the Necronomicon, in Azarath. It mentioned an entity called Zezhe-"

Kalibak raised his hand. "Don't say that name. Like any devil, speak that name, and in...it...shall walk."

Superman blinked.

"If this thing is so unstoppable, why are you telling us this?"

Kalibak grinned. "I made it bleed. Made it desperate. A force to devour universes it may be, Son of Jor-El, but it is not unstoppable. We can stop it, together. Light and dark, Gods of Good and Gods of Shadow, New Gods and Old Gods. This thing wants the Galaxy to burn in a hell of endless peace and false serenity."

He spat. "If I, a brute with nothing to my name but raw strength can make it bleed, then together, we, all of us, we can make it retreat. We can save our multiverse."

He grinned with a terrible and autocratic smile. now the full image of his father, the dreadful ruler of Apokilips. The League looked at each other.

Superman bit his lip. "We will see. For now, remain here."

The Dark Gods nodded, this more than they had expected.

**Gotham City, Nighttime:**

She knew what she should be doing. Seeking a way to achieve the grand goal, the absorption of a single multiverse at one go. The next leap from where she'd already gone. But she was a being of chaos and she was a being of madness and neither could remain consistently focused on a single goal for too long when there was short-term fun to be had and the greater scheme had already been fixed as was, and thus was it that the Azar of Azarath, in her civilian guise of Yolanda Azania, flesh mutated by a glamor to resemble a normal human one, strode the haunted city at night.

Behind her stalked a demented figure, a clown prince of crime, who'd seen the obvious newbie to the city. She'd calmly strode into his territory and was not the least bit afraid or even seemingly cognizant of where she was and yet she'd been here deliberately. The puzzle maddened him and enraged him and delighted him all at once. As she strode, then paused, she read runes written into Gotham's walls.

So this, then, was the next phase of her neutralizing potential rivals or protectors of the Gem. In a short span of time, she'd find Jason Blo-

"Well well well, lookie lookie lookie."

The voice drawled behind her and she blinked in a lazy crocodilian fashion, turning slowly. To the Joker, Yolanda Azania was a tall woman, blonde and blue-eyed, in a sari of an almost unnatural blood-hue.

He cackled, the mad laughter of a clown that pursued a vendetta mixed with lust for his foe, the grim dark Batman that haunted the streets. He kept cackling and the laughter changed from normal to anger when the woman shrugged and turned back.

"I am the Joker, bitch. You don't get to ignore me in my city!" As he grabbed her and sought to pull her he shrieked as he almost tore his wrist off, shaking it and cursing and fuming. Then the woman did turn and the red sari transformed into green armor with a creaking sloshing sound like water trying to flow through thick mud, and as she turned she grew several feet taller. From seven feet to fourteen feet, then to her full twenty-five, growing wider and bulkier and yet surprisingly still seemingly an almost-normal woman.

Almost because her face went from normal to dish-like, and her eyes for a moment glowed in flame.

_**I care not for your games with the master of fear, maggot.** _

The voice was a low and rumbling one, infrasound amplifying it, it seemed to not merely be heard by ears and body but within the soul, boring into it and flaying it. Most men would quiver in fear and fall to their knees at the sound but to one as demented as the Joker, immune to nightmares and the forces that would paralyze most it was almost orgasmic.

He resisted the temptation to fall to his knees and was rewarded by the entity raising herself to her full height, an eyebrow raised.

_**A God lays me low and cracks my armor, a mortal resists the power of Fear that I can force upon them. I must be losing my touch.** _

The Joker saw Harley coming toward him, skipping and then raised a hand, trying to still her, shaking his head. She stopped. Mr. Jay never expressed concern for her. Something must be…then she saw the tall and inhuman overbuilt monster looking down at her Mr. Jay and went very very silent. Carnosaur-like breathing was audible and the beast-like creature turned toward her, almost mechanically. Bodies should not work like that but this one did.

Leering with an unnaturally wide smile, the creature raised a bejeweled gauntlet, palm up, rings beginning to spark with light.

_**Your little canvas on which you carved and made one in your image, and in your likeness. You are a smug and arrogant dog, clown. You resist fear because you are a man without fear. You resist madness because insofar as a mortal can be madness, you are madness made manifest. You slay maggots like yourselves, the little mortal vermin that crawl throughout this world and infest it, and because you do so on a grand scale they fear you.** _

Then she leaned forward, and the Joker caught the odor of her breath and stared into her eyes and caught the image of a timeless malice made manifest, and for a moment the super-sanity that meant he, alone among the villains and almost so among the heroes knew he was a character, that he wasn't real, that he could do whatever he wished and as long as it was truly grand and spectacular his very horrors would keep his own existence and that of Gotham intact meant that her perceived a like mind.

"What are you?"

The question was calm and yet genuinely fearful. It was so unlike the Joker that at that moment his henchmen chose to cut and run and Harley took out her mallet and sprang at the monster, which in a lightning-quick movement caught her in a gauntlet, closing the gigantic hand about her quietly and peacefully, not crushing her then but capable of doing so whenever and as ever it wished.

The voice again:

_**Every sacred dream of mankind made foul. Mine the hands that hung the stars in their courses, that brought light and darkness and made them separate. Mine the will that sets alight entire planets, if I should wish, or that renews them, if I should wish that. I am God, in the truest sense, a force of power that cares not from whom the blood flows, only that blood does flow, and that more universes become part of the endless peace where there is only an outward spasm of carnage and death, my creations and myself seeking a death that can never be for the deathless….we can and we do long for death, but not to us is she given or shall she ever be.** _

The being snorted and dropped Harley, who screamed and then clung to Mr. Jay, who took her and began to step backward.

Then the monster said:

_**That's right little maggot, run.** _

And with that the Joker grew enraged at reacting like the fools who deemed themselves real around him, his own canvases to carve, his tapestries to keep the world turning. His flower spat Joker venom into the beast's eye and he laughed with a demented laugh, only to fall very silent when the monster flicked it off, unharmed and then turned to him.

That leering smile followed and then the entity seemed to stride off, unconcerned, and as the Joker ran with Harley Quinn the monstrous Bane, who'd tried to meet with the Joker in Crime Alley saw the monster striding toward him, eyes burning.

"What are you?"

A casual backhand smashed him into a wall and the entity snarled.

Mortals defying her now. She hissed in anger and then realized she needed a truly spectacular gesture, one to take the taste of the start of her quest out of her mouth. Too much time wasted dawdling here and amusing herself. Too used to doing this through her proxies, she was out of touch with mortals and how the most demented among them would see what she offered and worship it, and it was not yet time for that phase of her existence.

In a far future, yes. Then she would be in a brass fortress on a throne of skulls, hatred and power made manifest, a colossus in armor with a doglike face, leering with a sword that cut through existence unhindered. But not now. Chaos had so much further to grow in her and there was so much yet to be done.

With a tremendous boom she launched herself out of Gotham, moving east, and her will surged forth, awakening a shadow of evil that had been hidden for far too long beneath the mountains of Shinigami Island in Japan. The reptilian beasts awoke and began to shriek, their endless ravenous hunger appeasing itself by falling upon each other.

And the monster smiled. Yes, this would do. Unleash a monstrous plague, or plagues, sufficient to draw the attention of the League, fight the Guardian this would awaken with one of her bilocations, use the elemental and magical Chaos of the awakened Guardian to keep the mages' eyes busy. The villains she unleashed and was gathering beneath her control were not enough. As one of her seemed to bud out of the other, multiple eyes and teeth and limbs and fingers in a shimmering almost diaphanous light eruption, the other smiled and then vanished in a crackling green light.

And returned to the Citadel of Skath. Studying the Wards with a sinister smile. Well, perhaps not neutralizing Jason Blood as yet. First….first there was neutralizing these wards and sending a message to Trigon even that arrogant daemonic overlord, the Angra Mainyu, could not ignore. Bejeweled ringed gauntlets began to move, rings sparking with eldritch light and carving out circles of glowing counter-runes, and a rumbling and unnatural voice echoed with the mystic incantations of eldritch nightmares from beyond, eyes cracking for a moment and glowing with the sinister and terrible light of animate universes. A rumbling and unnatural sound began to echo, the runes glowing into existence, and a great and dreadful battle of wills between masters of multiple universes began in a dark and profane place, an unhallowed ley line nexus that began to flare and charge the world with darker and savage magics that threatened many things…..


	10. The Last Hope:

**Aquaman's Room, Watchtower:**  
  
After the stories and footage from the sons of Apokilips the League had dispersed for a time to meditate and/or to consider the potential of what the stories told. Only three individuals knew that there was no other option but to form the unholy alliance, one the girl with violet hair and grey corpse-like skin that meditated in an attempt to still the raging torrent of her mine. One the woman whose sword flashed in lightning maneuvers as she used it in a somewhat more martial route to the same end.  
  
And one the hook-handed King of Atlantis, who was looking at an old story his advisor Vulko had once told him as a parable about hubris and folly. A colony of Atlantis in the Pacific, Mu, the Panpacific Empire. The Lost Nation. The Monster-Makers. Inspired by the ancient Leviathan of the Marianas Trench and its glowing blue flames, they'd built strange new lifeforms, the Gyaos. Gigantic bats whose sounds could be converted to a beam reputedly able to slaughter anything that moved. The Gods took great offense at the creation of life, sparking the wrath that erupted into the downfall of Atlantis itself.  
  
And from their own science the Gods fashioned their own creature, one the Atlanteans referred to as a Guardian of the Universe (he snorted with derision wondering what the Oans would make of such a term). Gamera.  
  
He recited the ancient rhyme in Old Atlantean:  
  
 _The last hope, Gamera. We bestow it to the cradle of time. May it awaken to fight the shadow of evil._  
  
Then the news flashed with the story of a tanker carrying uranium waste deposits hitting a moving atoll, the tanker sunk but all the fuel and the uranium drained, somehow. He blinked. A moving atoll? He knew of only one thing in all the ocean that could seem to be an atoll when coming out of the suspended animation of countless millennia.  
  
"Gods have mercy on us all, Vulko wasn't telling me a legend. He was telling me history. But then if the last hope has awakened….."  
  
 **Shinigami Island:**  
  
The Great Maw, the Shadow of Evil, awoke with ravenous intent. Fivescore and six had become five, the monsters rising from infants to sixteen meters in a matter of twelve hours, the endless hunger assuaged first on each other, and then swooping down on hapless screaming inhabitants of the island, mankind and animal alike. Scattered reports came of great and terrible bats devouring people on the island.  
  
The Self-Defense Force sent a small team of soldiers there, including one soldier who had ties from a visit to Metropolis where he'd had the unpleasant circumstances of making more acquaintance than he'd wished with a strange abomination called Bizarro. Remembering this, he sent a desperate second plea for help to the Watchtower, a plea received by J'onn and Raven, who interrupted their chess game to see the soldier's message and the peculiar barking shriek. A brief flash of an arrowhead-headed monster, a reptilian nightmare that swooped in and a splatter of red that made them both wince in pain.  
  
"You're doing better, Raven." J'onn smirked. "Perhaps with enough practice we might even get to sixty-forty." She smirked a bit in turn and then they said simultaneously "The League has to know about this."  
  
 **Skath's Fane, the Jump City Library underlevels:**  
  
As all this went on, a war of multiversal gods waged with unrelenting fury and might. The Azar incanted with the odd and dissonant tones of new languages and long-dead and forgotten tongues, Trigon's power in turn blazing with the fury of an awakened Archfiend's Might. The Azar was not used to struggling but against the Archfiend she encountered a being at her own level, and in this found herself enjoying the context, the rivalry. The outbursts of power where before them the Fane's outer limits became areas of warping and weaving, physics dancing and forgetting its innate power and reality.  
  
A song of death rivaled the runes of dreadful might guaranteeing a dark day would come regardless, surges and flashes of light and darkness, sometimes separate, sometimes merged in the Unbeing before Creation. The monster that incanted seemed at times less than human, at times a normal human, at times a colossal two-headed dragon, each head with a ceratopsid frill and one gnawing on the other. The attacks the beast launched were akin to those of the human form and to that of the sometimes-seen many-angled thing that was neither flesh nor thing of the higher spheres but a monster with footsteps in both. Or the gigantic creature in armor with the flashing terrible swift sword that laughed madly and bellowed in great delight.  
  
The runes that seemed to glow alone were sustained by a colossus with vast horns on a throne in the Malebolge, seated on a throne of utter darkness, the force of evil and the shadows beyond shadow interwoven into it. Four eyes glowered and gleamed with eldritch power and as the runes began to weaken, Trigon's omniscience at last penetrated the wards the Azar had set about her own plan. Anger surged in the Lord of the Eighth Level, and the Malebolgia rose to his feet.  
  
 _ **The Earth is mine!**_  
  
Four glowing red eyes formed out of fire around the Runes and four blasts of terrifying power struck toward the Azar, who turned with a face elongated and distorted by nine blue eyes, each burning alike and lancing forward against the Lord of the Malebolge. Light surged and rippled, dancing up and down, back and forth, and then the beams of tremendous power finally reached an oversaturation point and erupted with a thunderous boom heard not just within the environs of Jump City, but as north as Sacramento and ranging into Nevada and Arizona.  
  
Five teens in a great T-shaped tower were among those who detected the boom and rushed to it, Starfire carrying Robin, Cyborg flying for short leaps with newly installed rocket boosters in his shoos like a heavily mechanized and armored and funnier Hulk, Supergirl and Beast Boy flying over to the library. They arrived to witness spiderwebbed cracked ground, stepping carefully into darkness where they heard roaring and cursing, spitting in a strange voice:  
  
 _ **Well done, King of the Malebolge. You've made me bleed. Made me feel pain.**_  
  
They winced at an oddly organic cracking sound and the slopping sound of meta stretching and adjusting around a frame, a wet and breathy laughter following. Then they arrived with surprise and in Supergirl and Starfire's case a dawning sensation of strange cold running like electric fire down their spines. A dark and morbid fairy tale come to life, a heavily armored twenty-five foot tall giant spitting blood on the ground, armor cracked and yet healing with a strangely organic sound and the faint and rumbling peals of thunder like a demon laughing.  
  
The armor healed, the beast rose to her feet and turned to gaze at them. It turned back to the strange glowing areas that concealed something within a fog vaguely like a hand.  
  
 _ **So this is what you've come to now, Malebolge-Lord? Hiding behind children?**_  
  
The voice seemed to flay into their souls, Robin and Beast Boy literally shaking in fear. Cyborg found himself strangely grateful to be more machine than-the monster turned and of all of them zeroed in on him with a hissing rumbling displeasure that sounded like boulders grinding together.  
  
A bejeweled pointer finger on her right gauntlet was aimed directly at him.  
  
 _ **You.**_  
  
He blinked, stepping back a bit.  
  
 _ **You look like someone very familiar to me, a great thorn in my side. You are not the Terminator, but you are enough like him that I will take great pleasure in rending you as revenge by proxy.**_  
  
Cyborg's fear was replaced by anger.  
  
"So what, all us black cybernetic guys look alike?"  
  
The creature laughed with a cold and sinister sound. The daemon laughed again and with that, the creature, woman-like and yet simultaneously almost like a machine and a barely tamed wild beast, crouched with a blood-rimmed unnaturally wide smile crossing her lips. She prepared to spring into motion to remove the distraction…..  
  
 _ **The Watchtower:**_  
  
The rest of the League, save Batman and Green Arrow and Wonder Woman, collectively flinched when the arrow-headed reptilian monster surged down and devoured the man who'd sent the request for aid.  
  
"Well, gentlemen," with a slightly shaken laugh, Hawkgirl smiled. "Who's up for a little monster hunting?"  
  
Aquaman cleared his throat and the League turned to him.  
  
"Those things won't be all we encounter when we go to Japan. I….have my own story to tell you that will explain to you just what we're about to get into…."  
  
 **The Jump City Library:**  
  
When she moved she became a blur that neither Starfire nor Supergirl could see. Robin fell with a strangled sound when the blur grasped his throat with a feather-light touch that induced in him a somnolescent state. The boy might serve a useful purpose with the man who mentored him, after all. Cyborg's trackers sought to identify her and yet the first inkling he had of her presence was a freight train-like impact that smashed into him with overwhelming force, hitting him against a wall with a strangled sound of pain and fury. A great fist-like impression was left in his chest, and the impact knocked him out with swiftness, as Garfield charged the monster in the form of a Tyrannosaur, seeking to bite on her gauntlet. Shrieking in pain and losing several teeth (that fortunately as a byproduct of the shift and his metabolism would regrow in two days) he was then smashed against a wall with a feather-light shove with sufficient force to crater it and reduce him to being Beast Boy again.  
  
Three heartbeats had passed and the girls were helpless to do anything, seeing the monster kneeling before them with a hand stretched out as though she were swearing homage, metal forming from thin air and flowing into the form of a gigantic maul, a silvery Warhammer that gleamed like it was malice concentrated in visible, raw form. The entity smiled, the blood now gone, and lunged for them both with that same overpowering blur.  
  
Guessing using all the training the warlords of Okaara had taught her, Starfire shot several starbolts that did manage to score direct hits not simply against the creature but into one of her eyes and in her teeth and on the gauntlets raising the hammer for a grand strike. None did any damage or seemed any more effective than shining a light on her, but she did manage to score the hits. Then the hammer smashed into the ground and the shockwaves blasted them both back.  
  
Starfire snarled and then spoke in Tamaranean: _I pretend to be an insipid little girl the better that my friends forget the howling warrior who nearly laid them all waste. I hold back righteous fury and the honed instincts of a warlord trained to kill for the sake of the man I love. But you…you I need spare nothing on, you can take it, can't you Zezhelanzunui?_  
  
The Azar smiled and then surged forward, lunging at her again with the massive hammer and as she dodged it, Supergirl fired heat vision into the Azar's back and ear, trying to cut her and instead drawing the monster's attention, the creature moving just fast enough that she could not see it but not fast enough she couldn't anticipate its direction. Barely dodging another pair of swings of the hammer, Supergirl and Starfire nodded and both collided into the monster with terrifying speed, blasting her clean out of the underlevels and out of the streets with a grand eruption of force. The monster leered down at them, smiling with terrible intent and then with a light brush of one hand hurled Supergirl high into the skies and grasped Starfire in a tackle, hurling her with tremendous force back into the underlevels, the Tamaranean landing on her back, her uniform torn by the friction, her blood smeared on the ground.  
  
Shaken at the impact, she then felt that same somnolescent power and as the Azar raised her hammer as a counter Supergirl smashed into her, knocking her down briefly, before the monster with an almost boneless maneuver raised herself to her feet and grasped Supergirl by hers, smashing her like a metronome and then hitting her into the wall with the hammer, knocking her unconscious.  
  
Returning to the runes, the monster bared her fangs with delight.  
  
 _ **You relied on children as a distraction 'Trigon the Terrible.' They have fallen, and as easily as I would expect. But now…now I say to you, behold, I have come to light a fire on the Earth…**_  
  
The Warhammer raised in both hands, the monster's eyes now nine leering suns, teeth completely fanged and elements of green in her skin. A blend of human and of Urhalzantrani, the Azar at the height of her power.  
  
 _ **And it is kindled.**_  
  
The hammer collided and with an even more overpowering boom that registered on the Richter Scale and was heard as far north as Yellowknife in Canada and as far east as Denver, Colorado and as far south as Oaxaca, Mexico, shattering windows within a 1,000 square mile radius. The Runes fell. The Azar laughed with a terrifying gale of power as she saw the Hand of Glory.  
  
She grinned. Her plans were coming together quite nicely, now there was the next phase. None so well equipped to bring down a fragile and vulnerable young girl…  
  
Her form swelled and altered and seemed to ripple, the sloshing of meat and the cracking of bones shifting forming an unholy chorus as she stood in a tall and white-clad form with purple eyes and hair, and a manufactured chakra control gem in her head.  
  
'Arella' smiled with the Azar's inhuman leer for a moment before vanishing. It was, however, in the wake of this transformation that Supergirl and Starfire, though hurt and in Starfire's case hurt seriously enough that Supergirl had to cauterize the bleeding with her heat vision, saw this and sought frantically to warn Raven. To their relief, her communicator was active. Unknown to them, Raven received their message and then her eyes widened and went very pale indeed.  
  
 **Tokyo Bay:**  
  
After depopulating several of the smaller islands of Japan, the Great Maw, the Shadow of Evil flew in five sixteen meter forms to Tokyo, shrieking in that stuttering cackle of endless unassuageable hunger, motivated by ancient masters. Behind them an island moved through the waters, slowly but inexorable, the consciousness within satiated and fed and prepared to initiate anew major combat with its most ancient foe…


	11. Zauriel's Wrath

**The Citadel of the Temple Azarath, the Azar's Throneroom:**

To speak of the Temple Azarath as a place or a being would be inaccurate on each count. It was both and it was neither, a gilded and ivory orb spinning in raw power and finery amidst the sure and silvery stars of the grand multiversal empire-entity of Azarath. A place of absolute beauty and refinery such that the most perfection-obsessed and artistically inclined would fall to their knees and weep in awe at its achievement. A world where all was immortal and ever-young, invulnerable, able to leap and gambol amongst stars and to witness and hear the choruses of atoms, each alike in endless resonant chorus.

_Holy holy holy the Undying Flame, the Great Azar! Mightiest among the mighty, who hung the stars to burn and turned ash into gold._

The Citadel was six times the size of Earth, a massive ecumenopolis, daily ringing with the litanies of the half-mad immortal supermen known as the Monks and the Immortals of Azarath, the elite of the elite of countless universes of small-scale Gods altered from atoms to galactic superclusters. All was one in the Azar, made immortal and godlike at the price of its soul, of its very existence separate to the greater entity that was Zezhelanzunui, the Azar of Azarath, immortal Goddess and foe of the multiversal monstrosity that ruled the Malebolge, the Eighth Devil, the Dread Dormammu in other worlds and master of the Dark Dimension in a different facet of his being.

A being of order warped into being the first true god of Chaos in its rawest and most malevolent forms, a wrathful hunger that devoured and wreaked harm when and as it would. The Citadel within the Temple was the opulent ruin of the highest mountain range on the former world of ashes reshaped into a Palace suited for a God. Within a vast audience chamber of high double-vaulted ceilings covered in the deranged murals for its own eyes of a vast and inhuman intellect, there was a God on a gilded throne.

The God looked woman-like within limits, with a dish-like face and monstrously overbuilt, clad within dark green armor with a light blue cape, her hood down. Eyes burned like Suns, as this, the central hub of all the avatars of the multiversal monstrosity itself gazed with omniscient sight at the signs and wonders its own mind made.

Countless worlds and wars were held as one in that merciless and cold intellect, worlds gazed and given equal attention. In one, the Azar had just taken on the form of the Gem's mother, seeking to extend her power to a kind of bid she'd never yet sought to do. Not one universe, but an entire multiverse, one among many. Another grander addition to appease her endless and inexorable hunger.

That form walked the gateway between the worlds of that multiverse, preparing its grand deception with one of her avatars, and another, in Tokyo, readied herself for a grand confrontation of another sort. As that being strode the multiverse itself she raised an eyebrow at the sudden sight of a strange being rising from the mists between worlds, a being with brilliant wings and a glowing sword of flames.

_**An angel.**_ The God on the Gilded Throne spoke with a rumbling voice, the Ten Rings sparking with fire. _**The Angel Zauriel. Now there shall be a true fight.**_

**The Web Between the Worlds:**

Striding between the multiverse's various worlds, 'Arella' paused when she heard the challenge booming from the voice of the Angel Zauriel.

_Halt, abomination!_

The being that wore the white cloth and hood of a woman shielded in a small enclave by the arcane geometry of the chaos within the multiversal monstrosity paused.

Human eyes became inhuman, muscles began to rasp and with a grinding and slopping sound the entity rose to face the angel, now a twenty five-foot tall being with metal forming into the shape of a colossal Warhammer held in one hand, the glowing eyes of flame boring into that of the Angel, who drew his own flaming sword.

**I am Zauriel, guardian of the gates of the Silver City. You are not yet worth the presence of the Spirit of Vengeance, so you face the Guardian.**

_**A fallen angel to combat a fallen God. How appropriate.** _

The normally inhuman tones of the creature were rife with mockery, and as the flaming sword was raised in a challenge, the monster swung the hammer with an unnaturally swift motion, her shoulder barely seeming to move. The sword slashed at the hammer, ripping into the metal, cleaving the head in two but the monster lanced backward with a sinister rippling laugh, reforging itself into a solid hammer as the monster swiftly looped the hammer and hurled it upward.

Again the sword blocked the hammer and its cutting power permitted it to tear through the will and the whim of the Azar's power, but again the hammer reforged itself with a strange slithering sound, the monstrous entity then maneuvering with a brutal swiftness, deciphering the angel's technique. The hammer collided into him with a tremendous force rippling in the waves between worlds, hurling the angel back with force flipping him head over heels.

He maneuvered with an almost boneless grace, then with his sword flashing lunged at the monster, which casually raised a hand, palm up and fingers near-clenched with a sinister smile before his sword flashed. The gauntlet fell from a stump, and the entity's flaming eyes flashed as she then unleashed rolling beams of fire from her eyes that collided into Zauriel and hurled him backwards with that same boneless grace, the hand re-attaching with a sickening cracking and slopping sound.

_**Your sword, it can cut through nearly anything.** _

The entity smiled, an inhumanly wide leer as she replaced the Warhammer with a monstrous battle-axe and formed a shield of similar substance to her armor.

_**I have a sister whose soul manifests with that kind of raw disturbing power. The Hammer of Judgment they call her. The Lightdancer.** _

Mad booming laughter followed. Eyes flashed from suns to the infinite reaches of uncaring space, the entity maneuvering forward, healing the gouges ripped into her shield with swiftness, Zauriel barely dodging the swift maneuvers of the axe. Even his power was slowly being worn down where the entity he faced was either the same or stronger.

**What manner of monster are you?**

_**Eldest and fatherless,**_ the voice echoed, _**firstborn of the Ruinous Powers. The Undying Flame. Once a woman who believed herself in folly designed to slay the very thing you see now.**_

Again that mad laughter.

_**That thing was me all along, and everything she did to destroy me made me. I am the death of empires, decay and ruin, entropy made manifest. The raw savagery of the howling monstrosities that burn and rend asunder all that they have seen or will ever see. I am Zezhelanzunui of the Urhalzantrani, a race of immortals who have attained a goal none have since the Fallen Ones fell into dreaming death.** _

Zauriel lunged in between her axe and her shield and then slammed the blade into her face, causing the entity to veer back, blood pouring from a deep vent that healed as swiftly as the rents in the metal. The weapons disappeared and the entity crouched in a three-point posture, smiling through bleeding teeth with that inhuman leer.

Then she lunged forward and as the angel swung downward she blurred, reaching a speed even his immortal finely-tuned senses could not detect. First a set of hammer blows to his stomach rocked him with a pain not felt since he'd directly confronted the demon Etrigan, then another swift set of blows to his face and to his side, the flaming sword released from his clutch when a grip of iron closed about his wrist.

Snarling, he then headbutted the monster, causing it to growl in pain, releasing him. His hand healed and he swiftly grasped the sword, ramming it into the monster's belly, the sword cleaving through the armor and reaching through her back, roaring as he sent the power of the Presence burning into the beast's insides.

The human-like creature roared in pain and then the roar became laughter.

_**Very good angel, you know what to do with your sword then.** _

**How have you not fallen?** His voice held an unusual emotion for one such as he. Wonder. True, sincere, unhindered awe. A monster was suspended on his sword, blade hissing with the blood turning to steam, and then the monster smiled and pale pink flesh became dark green, dish shapes becoming a monstrous horned frill, teeth lengthening to fangs.

_**Because I am who I am**_. With that the monstrous creature placed both her hands together and they swung downward with inexorable force smashing the angel backwards, colliding into one of the Pillars of Creation that suspended the multiverse, ripping the sword out in a monstrous spray of blood. As the blood and the internal injuries healed, the monster roared with a primordial foghorn-sound that brought something else unusual to Zauriel. Blood from his nose and his ears, tears of blood falling from his eyes, whimpers of pain. The monster laughed and as an assertion of power surged from the God on the Throne, eerie sickly green light surged around her with a lightning-like fashion, and her body healed instantaneously when the light shone around her.

Standing tall and proud, the monster then spoke to Zauriel, as it grasped him and then suspended him in space above the Earth.

_**It is time,**_ she spoke, _**to send a message to the Inferno and the Silver City alike. None shall withstand me and if the Gods and the Demons seek to join with mortals it shall matter not if the entity is Uxas or the Presence, you are all of you beneath me. She raised him above her, and then with a sudden and overpowering assault on the very fabric of reality that same foghorn sound ripped across time and space, into the dwelling of the siblings known as the Endless, from New Genesis to Apokilips, and further than that into the halls of the Monitors**_.

A tremendous rippling fire echoed and Zauriel was hurled by inexorable force down, down, ever down. Screaming in anger, he fell with a tremendous explosion into Metropolis, where the impact and the disturbing nature of the encounter led to his fall. The entity snarled again. Again she had bled, this time against an angel, and it was taking more power than expected to prevail, and even then it might have gone either way had the angel used that sword a bit more swiftly than her manifold mind adjusted.

The being returned to her central manifestation for a time, pondering how to adjust the nature of her assault. The runes around the Hand of Glory were fallen, the first of the great Cosmic assaults repelled, if with difficulty. And there was still the Avatar in Tokyo, who as all this was going on was a participant in a great and terrible clash with reawakened Gods and Daemons of ancient times and elder days…

**Tokyo:**

The Great Maw sent its manifestations into the city, and while four of the five fell upon the citizens in an orgy of slaughter, one of them detected a much more delicious prey. A being kneeling on a rooftop, hands clasped and digging into the roof, light blue cape whipping in the wind. Twenty-five feet tall and massively overbuilt, lower jaw concealed by a strange apparatus, suns that burned where eyes should be.

Against this a sixteen meter tall creature that bellowed with a stuttering cry and sought to devour this larger-than-normal prey. With a sudden and terrible maneuver the prey fell upon her intended hunter, a massive blow striking the beast's stomach, leaving the impression of a fist within it. The entity shrieked in pain and the shriek became a blast of yellow light that ripped across the back of the other entity, blood spurting from the newly-carved valley, the monster's shriek then lancing across the entity's face.

Bellowing in pain, the monster flew upward and it was then that the waters boiled around Tokyo Bay and the Justice League's Javelin arrived along with the teleportation-aura of the Gem and the flying forms of Superman and the Martian Manhunter. The waters boiled and then fell, waves lapping into the land, a small tsunami reflecting the monster that displaced them. A monstrous head with gigantic tusks raised itself into the skies as the weight of ages fell from its back. An elephantine roar split the darkness as Gamera lunged forward toward his immortal enemy, the damaged Gyaos flying away from the Azar, lunging toward Gamera with a shriek of delight at facing its ancient enemy.

Curses of awe were expressed from the Justice League and narrow eyes from the Azar as Gamera's massive paw slammed into the Gyaos, hurling it into an electric center, the center sparking, and then energy growing in its throat. The fires that set the stars alight cooked and then a massive ball of flame erupted, and as a mushroom cloud rose, the monster blinked impassively. One prey down, four to go.

Focused only on his ancient mission, Gamera ignored the Justice League, though the monster briefly paused at the presence of the Azar, wounds healed and snarling at the kaiju. A threat, yes. Not the one he was primarily designed to counter, and that mission came first. It always came first. The monster roared again and began to stride through buildings heedless of the lives lost and roaring as it pursued the prey within Tokyo.

The Azar smiled an unfriendly smile at the Justice League and then flew upwards and away, as they chose to pursue the Gyaos, aiming to destroy them first so that the immense raw majesty of Gamera would return to slumber, mission fulfilled….


	12. Dies in Ultimate Mad Fire

**Titan Island, Jump City**

A crackling black and white portal opened on the island, producing an eerie sound like the maddened laughter of a fell daemonic force unhindered in power and majesty. From it stepped a tall and armored being clad in plate that shone with an unnatural sorcerous hue, a dark blue cape with a hood like that of a bird held by twin clasps with ravens on them attached to the armor. Beneath it was a woman of unnatural beauty, dark black hair that was past her shoulders concealed by the hood, bright blue eyes visible.

She gazed at Titans Tower with a strange pang of longing, remembering how her own life had fallen so far from where it was before she had risen anew. After all the misery and difficulties of living with the New Teen Titans…..he….had come. He had taken her flesh and remade it in his image and in his likeness, and she had waged a terrible and bitter war in body with her mind gone against her friend. Azar had schemed to kill Trigon via weaponizing her, and she had in the end opted for something very different, realizing that like attracts like.

Re-entering her body she cast aside all that she was taught and began to draw into her the very power that her father himself had unleashed, and slowly and by degrees Trigon fell, decaying and crumbling into ashes and she, newly empowered not simply with her own abilities but his, rebuilt the world and Titans Tower, carefully leaving a construct of her own dead body with a face by horror haunted. It was a deep sacrifice, but with Lilith possessed by the Rings of Azar they had someone who could give them all that she had given. When she'd absorbed this portion of the multiversal entity that was her father, she'd seen glimpses of countless worlds and schemes of his, and realized with a sick horror that her own flesh was so often a danger more than a hindrance.

With her newly enhanced power she'd forged for herself this suit of armor, retaining the cowls of the Azarathi monks as penace. And then from there to countless worlds within the multiverse. She spoke quietly:

_The pawn has become the queen, and the multiverse will be safe._

With that statement the daughter of Trigon casually seemed to vanish within a puff of smoke, crossing between dimensions as easily as others would cross streets, appearing within Titans Tower with that same smoke cloud rising around her. Her blue eyes seemed to take on an unnatural glow as the suddenly startled Titans, finally recovered from their damaging encounter with the Azar beheld another armored figure who'd randomly appeared in their midst.

Yet there was something…..familiar…about this one.

It was Supergirl who asked first "Raven?"

_I was known by that name once._

The voice that echoed had an infrasound-resonance that made the team shiver slightly, and then she lowered the hood. A beautiful face with bright blue eyes gazed at them. A Caucasian face more…..normal seeming….than the grey one they knew in their own world, the unnatural corpse-pallor that they took for granted.

_Now I am Redeemer._

They looked at each other uncertainly, and then she withdrew from her side two mystic artifacts of her own devising that made her gauntlets glow, a light that suspended all of them, even Supergirl in a vice grip they could not break.

_And you will tell me the location of Trigon's bastard in this world that I may kill her. There are too many of us that seek to wreak harm, and here, this one? She's drawn an abomination that will seek to rule your universe and countless others through her._

Her blue eyes flashed.

_To me has it fallen to seek redemption in the only way it ever comes. From blood, and its shedding._

They all sought to resist, Supergirl adapting the techniques of Torquasm-Vo, Starfire clinging to the same raw elemental power that permitted her to withstand the barbarous torture of the Citadel without falling into it.

_I feel your resistance. Rather touching, really. But useless._

As they began to scream, Redeemer smiled and her beautiful face became an inhuman one of reddened skin with four golden glowing eyes, the true Power within her surging and enhancing the brutish forcing into their minds…

**Tokyo:**

Gamera smashed through more buildings in pursuit of one of the Gyaos. The creature had sliced into his shell with beams that left scrapes and scratches of green that the monster's healing factor was repairing even as it continued to roar, unleashing a wave of fireballs that plunged an entire neighborhood into a flame-ridden nightmare, consuming alive everyone and scoring damage on the wing of the Gyaos in question.

Barely five minutes had passed and almost a fifth of Tokyo was rubble and in flames, the Justice League detailing some people to evacuate as many as they could, in particular the Flash, while others, like Superman and the Martian Manhunter sought to tear down the Gyaos and remove their presence from the city in hopes that this would remove the reasons Gamera had for being there.

They'd cornered one of the monsters, which was incapable of focusing on them due to their combinations of super-speed and super-strength, though their beams and fists did a surprisingly limited amount of damage to the monster's flesh. Whatever Aquaman's ancestors had made the Gyaos out of, the material was tremendously resistant. But…..not sufficient to withstand two flying superhumans who abandoned any limitation on their powers and adopted a mentality of shooting to kill, as Superman grasped it by its throat, crushing its vocal cords and silencing its greatest weapon with a ruthless clinching of his fingers, the Martian Manhunter then managing finally to tear one of its wings off with his own heat vision. After that, Superman suddenly had an insight and froze the monster as it fell with his breath, turning it into a one-winged sixteen meter ice sculpture, before hurling himself through it, shards of ice raining down from the sky.

Two down, three to go. In the distance, under a starlit sky that was brighter as Tokyo's lights dimmed parts of the city burned on a scale unimaginable, a brilliant flash of light and another mushroom cloud marking the demise of the Gyaos Gamera had chased. Three down, now.

On a rooftop, however, Raven found herself confronting a newly healed and swaggering monster that towered over her. She was tall, monstrously overbuilt. The creature that had suborned the Azarath she knew, the peaceful realm with its tall white-haired goddess in the red sari who'd taught her to wield her powers and pacifism to restrain the roiling rage and terrors that were her inheritance by blood from the daemon Trigon.

_**The city burns as a literal smokescreen, Trigon-spawn**_.

The monster laughed as she said to her: _**You have seen what your father is. And now you see what happens when the Goddess you revere becomes everything I could have been. Not an 'almost-' Goddess dear child, a God. Sacred dreams befouled, pacifism rewritten in fire and sword, in iron and blood.**_

Raven's hands sparked with black and white energy, the white crackling like lightning.

"Azarath Metrion Zinthos!" Her power surged forward, the monster bracing herself with her hands in an X-fashion, and to her surprise the impact smashed into her with sufficient force to scrape her back along the roof. Seeing this, Raven repeated the incantation, unleashing blasts of progressively greater power, moving the tremendously overbuilt being backward, even as the being snarled and her rings began to spark with burning starlight.

The blasts continued, on smaller and larger scales, and the immense entity's avatar was smashed backwards, leaving a deep furrow in the roof of the skyscraper until Raven blinked. The entity was now over the roof and not falling, her hands still crossed in the x-fashion. A localized heat-shimmer gleamed where the ten rings sparked with unhallowed light, light that illuminated elements of the beast's face.

Then she uncrossed her arms, and clapped her hands together with a tremendous boom. Raven formed a shield of her soul-self around her and even then the concussive force blew her off the roof, a startled squawk following, as the monster crossed her arms in a fashion now reminiscent of Superman. Or, given her armor and the kind of madness she was producing, given that the Gyaos were being pursued by a titan of an ancient world whose roars were audible, flashes of miniature suns followed by mushroom clouds and more rippling fires that turned cold night into a heated inferno, more like General Dru-Zod.

The monster smiled at her.

_**Every Azarath you would find is a part of me, a reflection of my vision. Consider it: a mysterious woman with three incarnations gathers monks, purges them of vital parts of human nature and in so doing awakens her very nemesis? Teaching you means to control your abilities that are self-destructive? A fractured psyche and repression equal a perpetual motion machine of blood and horror, Trigon-spawn. That was not taught to you to help you, it was taught to you to punish the daemon by making his daughter into an engineered pawn against him.** _

_**The monks never cared for you, they despised you and hated you. And Azar, to whom you pray?** _

She laughed with a terrible sound even as one of the two remaining Gyaos careened toward her, leading Raven to prepare to teleport away.

_**I am her!** _

Raven stopped for a moment as time stood still.

"No. The woman I pray to was a harbinger of peace and goodwill. She taught me everything that I am. You? You are madness!" The Gyaos smashed into the Azar and with that Raven did teleport away, the Azar moving with a boneless spiral motion to whirl around, twenty-five feet of overbuilt armored muscle arrayed against sixteen meters of genetically engineered flesh. She roared in turn and then unleashed a wave of telekinetic force that hurled the monster back, before blurring and unleashing a set of tremendous fists.

The ground shook and a monstrous shadow moved toward her, turtle-like. Fire gathered in its throat and the monster prepared a massive roar, one that did follow. The usual sonic assault of its powerful lungs, doubled, and the fire gathered in its throat before lancing out in three miniature suns that erupted around the Azar and the Gyaos, the latter exploding in a shrapnel of immense force, the former screaming in genuine pain and falling to the ground.

Gamera leaned down toward the Azar. The tiny thing had survived the blast and his programming finally detected something of its threat. Six more fireballs followed and the Azar's howl of pain grew the more immense before Gamera turned. One Gyaos left. More tiny things around it, beam blasts and fists echoing with tremendous force, and the monster frozen in mid-air by a burst of strangely cold wind that turned it into ice and shattered.

Gamera roared in triumph, returning to the sea. Its first task was done. After it stepped on the cracked and charred armor of the Azar, smushing its foot to try to crush her, the monster was disconcerted. The bigger tiny-thing wasn't broken. Some part of her resisted him. The Guardian's duty was not altogether done then but he wished to return to the ocean, to fully gather his powers.

As the League looked with disconcerted faces at the smouldering firey rubble of nearly half of Tokyo, they bent their collective efforts to help retrieve bodies, a gruesome duty that Raven was spared from because of her youth. Instead the empath dedicated her time to grief counseling, and the world trembled. Monsters, the gigantic kind worthy of myths of heroes taking nine steps and crushing world-serpents in a fated and final clash of titans, had become real. Nearly half of a city burned and millions had died and even the Justice League was slow to respond to the sudden and unprecedented nature of what had occurred.

In one area of rubble, the gathered crewmen moved hesitantly. The monstrous footprints of Gamera and the trace of multiple blasts of those plasma fireballs were very visible. So too, to their astonishment and growing horror was something that for all her flesh was blackened, her hair burned off and one of her eyes seemingly glued shut, her armor cracked and burned dry, was something else. Twenty-five feet tall, blackened flesh visible, bones exposed. Wheezing and muscles still rasping.

Then the stars changed over the Earth for a brief moment, something that led the sons of Apokilips on the Watchtower still recovering to curse with whispers of awe and drew the attention of every mystic on the planet. The stars changed, those of an alien sky and bolts of light veered down to Tokyo, slamming into the burned and cracked and brutalized form of the Azar, who roared not with pain but with an almost delirious-sounding rapture.

Healed and restored the new prime-avatar in this dimension of the Azar rose, armor restored, the men falling to their knees in awe and terror, whispering the words "Amatsu Mikaboshi." She laughed with a terrible sound and shot off into the sky with a tremendous boom. The Hand of Glory was hers. She knew, then, too, that Gamera could, as a Guardian of the Universe on par with the lords of Oa disembody her if she was as arrogant with him as she had been with the Gyaos.

More information to increase the effectiveness of her dark schemes, more caution. The God on the Gilded Throne smiled. Things were moving apace and accelerating. Then her gaze turned to Titans Tower and her eyes widened a fraction. Someone wanted to threaten the Gem, someone who could carry out the threat, for none so able to bring others down as their own parallels across time and space.

The God on the Gilded Throne narrowed her eyes. Perhaps she'd let this develop, then. The Gem was already fragile from the psychological and telepathic assault that ripped out the core of one of her most fundamental beliefs. This swaggering monster that sought to kill her might just rip down the rest sufficiently that she'd kneel before her and grant her all that she wished henceforth and forevermore.

Mastery not merely of one world, but all of them. A multiverse to appease the fathomless hunger of the monster in question…

**The Watchtower:**

When the League returned, Raven, tears falling from her eyes had teleported into her room without a word. The rest of them assumed it was the empathic backlash of millions dead, the same phenomenon that had shocked them all with its unprecedented severity, with the quiet wishes for a change for the better that roiled through them all.

In truth she was on her knees in her room praying and crying, her room's objects whirling around in the gale aroused by her emotions. Was the monster right? Was everything she was doing in vain, service to the mad laughter of a dark God? Then she saw her. The woman in red, the one she knew as Azar. She reached out to her and caressed her cheek and spoke to her with a voice of empathy and telepathy that reached into her soul, a counsel between two souls meant for one. And with that the storm fell and Raven righted her possessions, her eyes glowing with determination. Whether or not the dark God spoke the truth, she served an image and a likeness she herself had made. She would be true to that vision even if the heavens fell in the wake of the false one.

As she left her room, she saw the gloom and downcast nature of the League, and she felt that same sorrow overlain on the rest. Millions dead, the psychic backlash of their scream a wailing assault of misery. The League, protectors of the world haunted. And that moment when darkness fell over the world and the stars changed. It was then that the next shock happened when Superman looked on the monitor to see Lex Luthor looking at the League.

"Superman," the calm and arrogant tone of Luthor crackled with a surprising amount of concern given their enmity, "The Legion of Doom would like to offer help to you."

"Why?"

"We detected an unusual pair of seismic events in Jump City, connected to that Titano sized…..thing….that's been present at the site of several other anomalies. Circe identified for us who and what that thing is. We have our enmities but I'll see this monster in Hell first before I let it, or anyone, rule any universe."

Superman blinked, as did the rest of the League.

"How can we trust you?"

"Who said anything about trust, alien?"

Luthor smiled with a much darker expression. "In this case we have a common enemy that outweighs everything else. It changes nothing about when things revert back to normal, but…."

He looked at them. "If I am not mistaken this monster would be the thing that the giant turtle tried to charbroil and literally stomp into the ground and she survived and recovered, judging by our own satellites tracking her. Anything capable of withstanding that kind of treatment has no reason to exist in any sane universe."

He laughed. "So tell me, Superman, how about it? We can even call it an Unholy Alliance if you'd like."

The team imperceptibly nodded, even Raven who did so with a very pale face at the realization that the monster had survived something more powerful than she was and wanted her. Then that determination took hold again, Bravery for one of the first times in Raven's life in an ascendancy over Timidity.

Kalibak, fully recovered, stepped in as Luthor signed out.

"Well, you've got Luthor on your side."

It was then that a Boom Tube opened in the Watchtower and Someone Else strode through, dark and ominous looking with a heavy brow.

**Kal-El** the God spoke.

"Darkseid," Superman hissed.

**I have come to bargain.**

Superman blinked. Then the League nodded again.

"We shall hear you." Darkseid's glowing red eyes widened perceptibly, and then he looked toward the rear of the room where a young woman with dark grey skin and purple eyes tried to blend into the shadows. And he smiled with a raw and possessive grin, already entertaining schemes for when this Crisis was dispelled.


	13. Worlds Without End

**Titans Tower, Titan Island:**

Their minds yielded her the information they wanted. Redeemer smiled, baring her teeth in a horrifying gesture of power and domination. They would do that, of course. She had known they would. It was in their nature. Then she realized the nature of the information they held.

_So…_ she hissed _. So they listen to her, they give her what she wanted when they did not listen to me. When they drove me to desperation I still wish I could atone for but I cannot!_ As she hissed her skin turned darker red, her ears lengthened and her eyes glowed, and with the last four words the Tower trembled on its foundation. Then in a seeming instant that dispelled and she was back to the tall woman with bright blue eyes. The power she forced on the Titans dispelled and they dropped to the ground, startled.

She raised her hood. The Justice League. She had tremendous power, sufficient to level planets and remake them at the material level but such power had availed more ruthless and inhuman beings than she nothing. She would not go to them to seek her target, not immediately at any rate. She would make them bring the Gem to her.

_Salvation is in blood, as it has always been, and it will always be._

The sepulchral whisper made all of them, even Supergirl, fear for a moment and then the cloud of smoke followed as she vanished in less than the time of a single blink.

Supergirl blinked. "I need to call my cousin."

**The Watchtower:**

**The bargain I wish to give is direct, and it is given directly, Kryptonian.**

Darkseid's rumbling voice boomed.

**The Azar of Azarath threatens not simply one universe but aspires to threaten all of them. In a manner of hours she shall be thrown into a confrontation with another of my sons and hurled into another dimension where she shall prove this and lead to the first of the contacts with that other Earth.**

He raised his hand and images formed from his extended power, and Darkseid looked, his son Kalibak very quiet and very afraid.

**There are in truth 52 great worlds, each with its own sets of associated byproducts. We are Earth-8A, a world where we all share a specific set of roots, and that the destruction of Krypton that sent the young Kal-El to Earth was the product of a computer designed by his father. More precisely we are one of many quantum byproducts of a greater Earth-8, a change produced by the whim that brought Trigon's Gem into the Justice League instead of sending her to fight monsters and gods with children.**

He blinked, slowly and not lazily but with the detached eye of a predator.

**Soon the Undying Flame shall begin to expand her power to other worlds, which shall give us some time to operate, and it will draw in against her the Spectre and beings still greater, the Monitors. Beings to whom the worlds are things for them to guard and to protect, beings to whom one such as the Azar who would cut them off from their abilities to monitor and to watch would be an existential threat.**

As they saw the possible future beginning to spread, images began to form on each world, a massive two-headed dragon with one of the heads savaging the other, the images seeming to warp and shift between heads across worlds and on each given world by mere flukes of circumstance.

Darkseid looked to the League, who stared with dawning horror at the nature of the threat, and then he pointed directly to Raven who went very still and quiet and tried to fade into the shadows.

**And that young girl, the Gem of Trigon, offers her a means to do it that there is no true protection against.**

He blinked again.

**Prophecies cannot be stopped, because fate is unbreakable. In three years, Trigon the Terrible will break into this world and none of us shall be able to gainsay him. It is why neither the Spectre nor I can or have raised a hand against her given the…..complications….this produces for us.**

**But the Gem is capable of so much more than overcoming a single world, or transcending barriers between the Silver City and the Inferno.**

For the first time in their lives, Kalibak and Steppenwolf heard Darkseid sigh and the simple emotion startled them greatly.

**And it is for that reason that the terms of my bargain are very direct. I shall give you full aid, without conditions, to put an end this scheme, lest the attempts to upend fate produce ripple effects that reduce us all to living in the ashes, the last outposts of sanity in a dying universe that can never fully die, merely longing for death and committing ever worse atrocities on an endless sliding scale into immaterial ravening hunger.**

Superman nodded.

"Very well. The bargain is accepted."

Hiding dark dreams behind his monstrous brow, Darkseid smiled.

**I shall return. And Kalibak, my son?**

"Father?"

**You have finally made me proud.** The Boom Tube opened and Darkseid strode through it calmly, preparing to gather his Parademons to prepare the council of war.

**Dr. Fate's room:**

Dr. Fate continued to search in his library on the Watchtower. Raven had told him, crying and in a mood of desperation and hollowness and fear oscillating with bravado that disturbed him, what the monster that had spoken to her proclaimed. It was disturbing enough to have bargains made with the Legion of Doom and then with Darkseid in one fell swoop, and now this. He remembered the words Raven had almost whimpered as she recited:

_**Azar, the woman to whom you pray? I am her.** _

There was something odd about that. Everything he knew about Azarath fit into two categories. The Undying Flame, the immortal God-Empress of a Citadel who casually fried entire worlds if she was merciful and transformed them into parts of her if she wasn't. And the pacific cult that he knew, gathered by a regal woman in a red sari who'd appeared to people across the world in fourteen days and drew them to her, building a beautiful and transcendant dimension without parallel.

Then he found it. The Book of Azar, a copy given by a strange monk in what he termed the youthful reign of the Third Azar. A history of the Azarath he knew, and in it he sought to find the solutions to the conundrum. The more he looked, the more fascinated he became, then he closed it. The answer was here. He teleported into Raven's room, the young woman trying to regain the courage that she'd had briefly from the vision and the words of the woman who spoke to her, her mentor.

"Raven?"

She looked. Dr. Fate. Kent. One of her closest friends in the League.

"I want you to read this. I think you'll find the answers you seek here."

Taking the text, she began to consult it:

_Our society is one of peace, to a point that we would raise hands not even to defend ourselves, even were we to face the one situation that would move most lesser beings to this last extremity. Yet is true peace in itself a good thing? Our leader and priestess, the new Azar, has spoken to us of something strange that exists in time and space beyond. A realm of ivory and gold where the sacred peace we follow is befouled. A realm of immortals gifted with the power to suspend the very laws of time and space themselves, where rites of peace make men and women and those from beyond the stars change their flesh and turn upon their own._

Her eyes widened.

_Her grandmother gave our ancestors a choice to retain our corruption or to purge it. When we made the choice we attained heights of spirituality and white magic that are impossible to attain for most beings who retain things of this world in full. Some among immortals hold that the secret to corruption is to reforge flesh and blood, to make monsters of men that are inhuman and emotionless. Of fire and steely will and muscle whom no disease can blight, who shall know no_ _fear. His is a great vision, but it seeks to answer violence and death with more violence and for this reason it shall fail._

_The false Azarath, the brilliant Hell of endless light does not offer a choice, it grasps and it seizes without compassion. Those damned into that immortal peace would long for death and be unable to die, and in their madness would fall from Heaven to Hell, and go from angels in the end to daemons that care not from whom the blood flows, only that it flows._

_Of all the potential heresies in our thought we must watch most for the concept of the Undying Flame. It may resemble us, but in the end it will never be truly us. We have left some elements of original humanity beyond, but we have done so to purify our souls. In that Azarath, people abandon not merely their souls but their very material nature itself, becoming one with an entity neither time nor space nor flesh nor blood, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. We hold to our humanity, even if different, in the end because we wish to banish evil and to stand unbreakable before it, in ironclad conviction and purity no daemon may befoul. To give into a desire to compel others to react this way will induce the kind of corruption that tore down the original soul within the Undying Flame and remade of a saint a monster._

She blinked.

Then she pulled out her copy of the Necronomicon, Book XXXVII:

_Ye new creatures of Allah's great work arise in shadows, firstborn of new ages. In fire and flame were they born in a world beyond space and time where a great barbarian chieftain devised ye power to attain immortality, and on ye fabled steppes of Kelzhandar gained a mighty oath sworn unto him. Manifold are yey, ye Ten Thousand Spawn of the Universal Emperor, mighty among ye mighty. Of fire and fury did he forge a world in oceans of blood to the bridles of horses._

_Of his spawn ye greatest and moste terrible is ye Undying Flame, called by some with ye pagan name Azar, after ye olde deity of the Parsees. Old stories denote ye Azar was once a woman, of mankind borne, before waging war against a monster of her own visions, a daemon that changed flesh and devoured oceans and turned skies to starres unknowne._

_It is said that she promises peace unlimited, mankind purged of his moste terrible urges, of violence and death and lust and all else. Mankind able to gambol and leap and frolic among the starres, Woe to them who heed ye call of said abomination, for of all her kin she is moste terrible, offering not sacred dreams but their most foul fulfillment, turning everything glorious of mankind into ashes on ye void-winds._

She closed the books.

"So it is her."

Then she blinked again.

"She says she's where Azarath came from. That doesn't seem possible."

Dr. Fate nodded.

"Read a bit further in the book of Azar."

She nodded and reopened it:

_The false Azarath has from time to time sent emissaries, one to Azar's grandmother, one to her mother. In vileness and tongues of honey they assailed her, demanded of her that she yield to them and give them the fullness of their power. Proclaimed to her, and to us gathered that we were not ourselves but proxies of them, of a God on a Gilded Throne who sees all and does all things while never moving from that throne once in two thousand years._

_We are pacifists, so we raised no hand against them, we merely spoke to them and sent them off with the words that if they were the dream befouled, we are the dream as it should have been all along. These words said by her mother and her grandmother sent away the monstrous monks of the false Azarath, she herself spoke them to a colossal entity in the form of a woman clad in dark green armor._

_The entity told her for this blasphemy she would be the last of her lineage, and that her dream of vanquishing the Terrible One in his outer spheres and sealing him away from this multiverse would crash and burn. To which we told her that blasphemy against the Gods would reap its own reward. The entity simply laughed and then revealed herself as the monstrous Zezhelanzunui of forbidden mystical lore, eyes burning with flame and raised a great and burning sword, pointing to our vision-pools interwoven in the audience chamber._

_We saw the Gem, then, our future guest of two centuries._

Raven almost dropped the book.

_A youthful waif we must raise with heavy hearts to know nothing but dispassionate emotionless sorrow, neither love nor kindness, nor even time with her mother. And yet in spite of such necessary cruelty she shall burn with hope and willpower beyond most, attaining the power to rule multiverses in the same fashion that the laughing monster herself did. The monster, we believe, intended to show us that she would grasp that power in banishing the Daemon Trigon but instead, attaining the power for a time of omniscience and omnipotence and all that was, she restored the world and sealed it away within her for use later._

_For a time all stood still and the monster gazed dumbfounded, and then it roared to us, proclaiming us all heretics and our ways doomed to fail. In truth we know this. Our souls are hostage to a Great Game sealed before any of us were ever born. Yet in the end, if all else fails and the monster did triumph, either the Dark God Zezhelanzunui or the Daemon-Sultan Trigon the Terrible for the triumph of either would be equal in wrath, as long as even one adherent of our ways remains that true and pure light shall glow and it shall banish the lava-stained hells of Trigon or the terrible light and peace of the false-Azar._

_In the end all that is or will ever be comes down to choice. And in the end, when put to a choice, the Gem shall be able to decide if she shall be the end of all things mortal, or attain something greater and more wonderful than ever could have been imagined._

Raven closed the books.

"How much do they know?"

"Only what the Gods of Apokilips told them."

**New York City:**

The Azar manifested in a rippling appearance of sickly green light, healed in full of the effects of Gamera's blasts. The first phases of her plan were complete, the ritual protections around the Hand of Glory done, the damage to rock the faith of the child of Trigon complete. Now…..now she needed to begin to form the bridges between different dimensions, her sigil of the two-headed dragon, each appearing on the very prime iterations of each of the Fifty-Two worlds.

_**Fortunately I only need one Gem.** _

And with that maddened laughter the Azar stood as a Boom Tube opened behind her, and a figure rose behind her.

_**The Dog of War**_ , the Azar laughed with a mad laughter as she turned _ **. Uxas's proudest spawn, the one of whom he likewise is proudest. How very like your father, dog!**_

Orion leaped downward, lunging at the Azar, who crossed her arms in an x-like fashion, anchoring herself. He simply smiled with a chilling grin that brought to mind the very image of his father, restraining his fury.

Then he threw at her a Mother Box and as she blinked, uncertain of what precisely to expect, the Mother Box crackled with an unnatural light and she was hurled into the Boom Tube, tossed altogether out of that dimension as Orion then opened another Boom Tube to enter the Watchtower. Highfather knew of the bargain his father had made with the League. If Darkseid could work together with Superman, then perhaps the sons of the Fourth World would put aside their own grievances. They would have to.

He was under no impression that he'd done more than buy time but that time could not be too dearly bought…

**Earth-One:**

The Mother Box erupted in a flash of iron and the glowing light of the Boom Tube, dropping the Azar of Azarath into a New York street with a muffled roar. The Azar levitated out of the crater her impact made and looked around. Excellent. She could begin. She blurred with a sudden sonic boom that cracked windows across the city.

She smiled when she hovered over the Himalayas.

_**Upon this rock I shall build my church.** _

Her eyes glowed and then her true Power surged forth, as invisible hands began to carve into the Himalayas a design in flowing ivory and gold powerful enough to be seen from space, carving not merely into the air and the stone and the gravel and any unfortunate lifeforms in the vicinity, and as she finished she soon displaced herself to the next of the Fifty One Earths to be marked. She'd gotten away with it once from simple dumb surprise. She did not expect to be able to mark them all thus but as long as she could get the job done with minimal interruptions she was hardly inclined to seek out something as annoying as combat when she did not have to.


	14. Night's Plutonian Shore:

**Gotham City:**

The monstrous Azar who'd vanished between worlds hadn't been seen in a week or two, and in that time with the Unholy Alliance being forged at higher levels than she was included in, Raven had a blessed time to herself. She'd spent a lot of it watching and reading Miracleman, finding herself identifying strongly with both Michael Moran and the blazing man of perfect beauty that he became. There had been that strange incident in Titans Tower where something or someone very like her had appeared in a puff of smoke and then disappeared.

She remembered Supergirl's frantic messages about the strange armored monsters that seemed to haunt Jump City. Her emoticlones were running riot in her head, leaving their respective spheres and so it was that time. She levitated, finding her central zone of calm, murmuring in an incantation her mantra: _Azarath Metrion Zinthos_. Time lapsed like this and her mind stilled. As she did this, her windows frosted over in her apartment and…..something…..moved in. Like a glowing image of her in costume, two eyes glowing, the image itself writ in terrifying light.

Her eyes opened wide in shock.

_Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh….._ the voice. The voice was so damned familiar and she couldn't place it.

_You are alike, you and I. Children of the Demon Trigon, seeking what's right for our friends and for our families. Come to me, Raven, and I shall give you all that you need._

**Earth Two:**

The Azar kicked herself inwardly for failing to remember that it was always Earth-Two where the prime of the multiverse would be found in any average multiverse of this nature. Not like others where the designation was 616 or Holy Terra or what have you. No….Earth Two. She'd headed to the Himalayas again before deciding on a whim to release some of the frustration she felt at these brightly garbed and gaudy godlings clad in spandex who could and did hurt her, break her armor. Make her bleed.

Annoyed at the memory of the Tamaranean who'd managed to knock her on her back, she decided to start her reign of terror by heading to Jump City. Only to her slight surprise she realized that the Titans in this case were not in Jump City after all but San Fransisco.

_**Ah. That explains it. The Prime world merges different…aspects…of the broader multiverses.** _

Grinning at that realization, she teleported in to find five Titans fighting Cinderblock. The cybernetic black man whose existence made her eyes narrow and a rumbling snarl echo from her, the traffic-light clad boy who was throwing bird-a-rangs at the monster to herd it into a trap, the roaring Triceratops that smashed into Cinderblock and knocked him over before literally being kicked into the air and transformed into a bird, and the two women whose starbolts and black-and-white energy blasts slammed the monster, only for it to rise and roar in anger.

The Azar calmly formed a Warhammer out of fluid flowing metal conjured out of nothing and smiled with a terrible and savage smile, calmly striding behind Cinderblock and slamming the Warhammer into him with a sudden boom that caused the monster to fall forward, exhausted. Four of the five Titans were confused, one of them's eyes flashed very, very wide.

"You." One word, and the monster gave a mocking bow. The other four beheld only an overbuilt monstrous woman whose mere presence oozed an ominous aspect that gave an impression of terrifying power with nothing more overt than 'merely' being twenty-five feet tall with a dish-like face and an inhumanly wide shark-grin, the Azar exercising an unusual degree of restraint. There was nothing about this more terrifying than the likes of say, Kardiak, that monstrous beating-heart thing that seemed like something out of a Gothic horror novel. Or the deranged blue Mumbo Jumbo.

There was all the same a monstrous and intimidating force in that silent smile and the muscles rasping of the creature standing with her hands on the business end of her Warhammer, eyes narrowing every time she focused on Cyborg, who raised an eyebrow. The silence stretched into a painful awkwardness and then she spoke:

_**Mine is the house of pain.** _

_**Mine are the hands that heal.** _

_**Mine are the hands that kill.** _

_**Mine is the lightning flash.** _

_**Mine the hands that still the wine-dark sea.** _

_**Mine the hands that set the stars to burn.** _

_**Mine the hands that turned a world of ashes to a world of gold.** _

_**I am come to light a fire on the Earth and even now it is already kindled. I have come not to bring peace but a sword, to set the world ablaze and the Galaxy to burn.** _

She raised the hammer and prepared to move as Raven rapidly formed a shield around her team. The monster leered at her with an inhuman gaze as she said:

_**The children of the Devil should not walk among those who do good.** _

With that she blurred and the hammer smashed into Raven's shield, destroying it with a tremendous booming sound that brought Raven down with her nose and ears bleeding, before the monster blurred again and took down Robin with a light flick of one super-strong finger to the chest, winding him, and then as Beast Boy charged her in the form of a Tyrannosaurus she slapped him with a backhand that winded him likewise, causing him to fall down, moaning.

Starfire unleashed multiple Starbolts and eyebeams from righteous fury that the monster simply spread her arms, her right hand clasping the Warhammer and took with a savage laugh, eyes glowing with her own flame. Taking a moment for a breath, Starfire saw that while the street around the monstrous woman was cratered and melted, she was unharmed, and then with that the woman blurred outward and the hammer slammed into her, smashing her into the street. Starfire's biology gave her only a monstrous bruise across her stomach and her chest, she likewise winded. With that, the Azar turned toward Victor Stone.

_**You.**_ She snarled. _**In every world like this there is a man warped with prostheses in this form. You're like him. The Terminator. One of the two biggest thorns in my side. But you, Victor Stone, are not a God ascended, you are but a child remade in his father's image callously as though your own wishes and feelings mattered not.**_

As she lunged for him, Raven shielded him with her magic as she rose to her feet, unsteadily, the Warhammer's swing causing the shield to break and Raven to scream in pain as the monster turned toward her.

_**I told you children of the Devil have no role here.** _

The monster hissed, her muscles rasping and the Warhammer vanished in a flowing river of metal, her bejeweled gauntlets sparking and gleaming as she strode toward Raven with a deliberate slowness. She wanted the demon's brat to fear, but to her displeasure Raven simply stood her ground.

"My father can't make me afraid, you won't. You….you HERETIC!" Raven hurled cars and lampposts at the Azar, the cars exploding on impact and the lampposts grasped and snapped over her knee.

_**Heretic, is it? Is that the best you can call me?** _

Raven snarled and then unleashed blasts of her Soul-Self aimed right for the monster's eye. The Azar blocked two but the third struck straight home, the eye bursting and then healing, the monster snarling as she turned toward her.

_**I see. Point made.** _

The monster then clapped her hands together, knocking back Raven's friends, Starfire catching Robin and Cyborg Beast Boy as the shockwave blew them around. As she moved forward, she raised Raven up by her neck in the massive gauntlet, and began to squeeze. It was then that a massive bolt of mystic energy struck her dead on in the face, and she dropped the gasping Raven who tried to suck air into her lungs and struggled to do so.

The Justice League. Superman, Zatanna, Wonder Woman, Hawkgirl, Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Batman. They'd come to rescue the little children. As the Titans ran to Raven's side, she formed the Warhammer again and snarled.

_**This is between me and the monster, not you.** _

Zatanna glared.

"She is not a monster."

Raven blinked, eyes wide. This was the woman who'd told the League to attack her. What had ch-the creature blurred and moved amongst the Justice League, as Batman began to form runes with his hands backed by Zatanna, and Superman and the Martian Manhunter lunged at her, one aiming high, one low. The blows smashed into her with tremendous force and she slowed to visibility from the impact, snarling, before raising the hammer with both hands and slamming it into the ground to blast people aside The smashing impact worked, and then the monster turned back to see Raven on her feet, eyes glowing and smashing her with a tremendous fist constructed from her energies, the impact sufficient to knock her on her back.

Zatanna fired more mystic bolts of her own, and as the monster raised the hammer again, the Flash suddenly whirled around her landing dozens of blows, none of which scored an impact but proving the Speed Force was just outside her effective vision. Which she snarled and solved by channeling a blast of concussive force into her foot, raising it, and stomping down, producing a shockwave that sent the Flash spiraling around.

Hawkgirl took the opportunity to slam her mace into the monster's breastplate only for the impact to shudder up her arms and the Azar smiled before taking in a deep breath and unleashing a howling gale akin to Superman's that threw her into the sky. As she returned to keeping the hammer raised, the Titans returned with a set of sonic cannon blasts from both of Cyborg's hands, Starbolts, Raven's mystic strikes and Robin's birdarangs, followed by eyebeams from Superman and the Martian Manhunter and Zatanna's mystic blasts.

Raven, still incapable of speaking as her healing worked too slowly to repair the ravages of the monster's attempt to choke her, made a croaking rasp as her powers took the form of a tremendous raven, and her Soul-Self hurled itself toward the Azar. The Warhammer vanished and the monster formed her arms in the shape of an X only to be smashed on her back again, the runes this time finished.

Warding runes. The kind that certain books that mentioned her had within them. Only one of them truly understood that knowledge-she looked at Raven whose glowing eyes told that she was influencing the emotions and the minds of Zatanna and Batman to slightly modify the runes to maximum effectiveness. Snarling at that realization, she sighed.

Well, this wasn't quite what she expected but it was a Prime-Earth among the multiverse. Of course the people here would have greater reliance on the Powers That Be than those in Hypertime. She smiled for a moment in a more human sense that made her face oddly seem more monstrous, a gesture misplaced. It was her sister who made more use of the knowledge that all the New Ones had of the nature of existence and the random and arbitrary power of the Ones Beyond the Veil who binded and loosed. She called it awareness that all, in the end, was Story and that none of them were real, and because of that her power was perhaps the most cleverly used of all of them. They all had it, however, and it was that knowledge that led her to look at them more closely.

The Prime-Earth of this multiverse would be shielded more firmly than the rest, but its vulnerability, she realized, was in the connection with the Hypertime-Earth she'd attacked first, the one where the little demon-brat was in the Justice League instead of the Titans. Gazing again at Raven the monster smiled and as she realized the nature of her schemes would be able to change, she decided on a parting shot worthy of a spawn of her greatest foe.

Her throat began to glow and then as she prepared to unleash a beam of fire her Will strengthened from the God on the Gilded Throne and Raven found herself anchored in place, eyes wide with fear and wider that her emotions weren't flatting everything within a wide radius with their intensity. The monster inhaled and then unleashed a beam of flame that smashed into Raven and knocked her head over heels, burning her awfully along her face and teleported to the Himalayas.

To Raven's surprise, again, Zatanna was by her side.

"Why?"

Zatanna looked at the woman whose burns gave her something of a resemblance to Harvey Dent.

"Because I was wrong. Now hush, you need to rest and to heal." Darkness swallowed her and the monster manifested over the Himalyas, beginning to carve her symbol into them. That was not what she'd anticipated but it kept the teams busy while she continued spreading her scheme across the Fifty Two Prime Worlds. Another portal opened and she disappeared into a crackling field of green light that vanished with a foul-smelling odor behind it and the Sigil carved into yet another world.

Earth-Three would not at all be what she suspected…..

**The Church of Blood, Gotham:**

Raven blinked. She knew where she was from her mother's stories. It was rubble now, dried blood splattered on walls, and there was a lingering taste in empathic senses of the terror that had happened here not too long ago.

"Why here?"

_Because here is where your destiny will be decided, child._

The voice made her freeze. Regal Azarathi and the guttural Brooklyn-like sound of Gotham merged into one. It came from the shadows, where a tall woman in a dark blue cloak with a bird-like hood strode out clad in armor that made hard sounds stepping on the wood of the church. She was Caucasian with blue eyes, but something-the chakra stone.

The woman smiled.

_Yes, Gem. I am like you. A daughter of Trigon, though in my world he wants us to be rulers at his side, not the Hellgates in human form he tries here._

She smiled, hand clasped on the hilt of a sword that Raven's eyes were drawn toward.

_I was one of a team of seven, Koriand'r, Richard, Wallace, Victor, Garfield, Donna, and me. Gathered together to banish the demon Trigon, which we did. Once. He came back….and in my world I killed him. I drew on the full weight of his power._

Her eyes flashed and began to burn with flame, two becoming four as she smiled.

_You're the threat, Raven. You draw the monsters here. Trigon, this Zezhelanzunui thing that raves and rants and throws its hammer and besmirches the name of Azar. They want you. One to destroy the world, the other to master all of space and time and to absorb them within herself. Also destruction, to be sure, but of a lesser sort._

The woman looked at her calmly, even though her face had four red eyes that glowed like their father's.

_I am the Redeemer, Raven reborn and going through the worlds cleansing it of our presence, saving worlds at the cost of a single life. An angel, as designed by demons, something graceful fallen into sin. The power of the Demon Trigon cannot be wielded without blood, but righteousness and salvation come only one way. In blood._

She drew the sword and it flashed and the air whined as it sliced through it.

_I found this in my dimensional wandering in a far future. A faithless son mutilated a divine father and cast him down to slay him before circumstances happened and the father slew his son to save his soul by obliterating it. A weapon, in short, forged in a spirit perfect for what it is used for._

It seemed just an ordinary sword with strange runes on it. Then she activated a rune with a delicate press of a gauntleted hand and the sword blazed with a firey light, leading Raven to back up.

_So tell me, Gem, what shall you do. Shall you cling to the selfishness of existence and continue to endanger all existence, or shall I redeem it and you by killing you?_

The fire burned her face and she blinked, then gazed impassively at her as her eyebrows furrowed and her eyes narrowed.

"You're right. I am the threat that's causing all this." With a deep and a profound sigh, she sank to her knees.

"Do it."

_My pleasure._

Redeemer then raised one of her hands to force Raven to stand with her hands up, before bringing the flaming sword back.

_You've done the right thing, Gem._

The sword tore into her and Raven made a strangled sound as the sword punctured through her back, the fire burning within her body.

_Countless demons in that other future burned on this blade and its legacy. You? Your blood sanctifies it._

It was then that she saw a face that made her own eyes narrow with anger as Raven writhed, somehow still alive in spite of the flaming blade that had set her cape on fire.

"Leave her alone, devil. She doesn't belong to you. Or deserve this."

Laughing, Redeemer yanked the sword out and Raven fell, pale and unmoving, as she turned and gazed at Zatanna Zatara. Zatanna watched with fear and anger as Raven's body moved with breath, blood pooling and terrifyingly still alive.

Then the monster looked at her with a look of wrath and a bestial snarl followed:

_Zatanna Zatara, how interesting…._


	15. Earth Three:

**Earth Three:**  
  
The first sign of strangeness the Azar faced was when she landed not in a Church of Blood but an overt temple to Trigon.  
  
The second was when she, the proud and deranged monster, avatar of the God on the Gilded Throne, fell to her knees screaming in agony like her very fundamental moral and mental aspects were being rewritten. She stood up for a moment, eyes blazing and she snarled.  
  
 _ **Nothing shall control my mind, I am Azar the Undying, The Flame From the Outer Worlds, everlasting Foe of the Demon Trigon and all his manifold forms.** _As she walked, her armor began to vanish, replaced by a sari that was as though blood were woven into Azar walked calmly into the vast cathedral, her armor vanished and replaced by the blood-red sari. In other worlds this was a Church of Blood, here...  
  
 **A temple**. Her infrasound-resonant voice echoed with more than a slight hint of mockery. **A temple to Trigon the Terrible.**  
  
Light filled the temple and then something strode out of it. She blinked, and as she prepared to form her armor the entity raised a hand that stilled her though she knew not why. Like a man but larger, more densely built, with four blazing eyes he was. Skin the hue of a very bright crimson, hair a colorless white that seared eyes that saw. Ears pointed, with massive horns visible above the head. He was clad in armor himself, a great iridescent black armor with symbols engraved into it.  
  
A voice responded to her statement with its own gloating mockery:  
  
 **Welcome to Earth Three, where Good is Evil and Evil is Good. Here, I am the appointed image of the wrath of Neron the Golden, Trigon the Wrath-Dealer, Trigon the slayer of slayers. Trigon, Spectre who slew the Firstborn of the cold-hearted king in ancient times and elder days.**  
  
He laughed with a terrifying and sinister sound as he then formed a staff of ivory that slammed into the ground, rooting the Azar in place.  
  
 **You seek to brand other worlds and to conquer them, using the Himalayas as your means to brand them.**  
  
He grinned.  
  
 **Only one problem with that, really.**  
  
Then his voice became very haunted and she shuddered, a multiversal entity feeling some fear and revulsion at such a normal emotion from a swaggering multiversal conqueror's shard in any world.  
  
 **My daughter. In most worlds she denies destiny sought for her by the forces of Evil, but here she is the Master of Mankind by the Will of the Gods, with her Phalanx Titanes, and her vast armies of monstrous gene-forged. My own child, born of light and become a daughter of everlasting darkness.**  
  
Then his four eyes blazed into her own and he gazed with a sense of Power that smote her like a wind of fire.  
  
 **Something, I believe, you are familiar with yourself, Igna of Domdaniel.** Her eyes widened. That name sounded so familiar, how...how did she know it?  
  
She screamed again and fell to her knees and then an unholy Unlight began to ooze out of her and the labyrinth in the mind of the Avatar switched out as the Azar closed her eyes…..and Igna, the woman who'd come to the world of ashes and there built the Citadel at the heart of the Temple Azarath opened them.  
  
 **How?** Her voice was disbelieving and Trigon laughed and said:  
  
 **The price we pay for becoming all good or all evil is worlds where the rest of us creaks out. Here Trigon is not a being of Chaos who derives power from being warped into a vile and monstrous being of order, I am a being of Order, a Noble Daemon who embodies the impulse of punishment, the Hand of Doom that brings darkness and decay upon the forces of evil, a Red Death with illimitable dominion. In a world where God is evil and Neron, Lord of the Inferno, is His counterpart, I am His Spectre.**  
  
The creature leered at her.  
  
 **But I am not the one to fear here, no. That would be the puppetmaster wielding the Master of Mankind who's burning the world around her.**  
  
It was then that she noticed a sudden shimmering of light and a tall and monstrous entity strode out of the ashes around her. It was a being as tall as she was and as massively robustly built, but with dark black hair with streaks of blue in tiger-stripes through it, nine golden eyes on a chalk-white body, a leering shark's grin nearly splitting the entity's mouth in two. The cape was still light blue, but instead of grey the armor was obsidian and absorbed all light into itself bar the Unlight she produced, a sickly and unhallowed glow that led Igna to feel more than slightly ill. The loincloth was there, too, the armor vaguely hinting a future part of Igna and the Azar-who-was-to-be screamed against due precisely to that recognition.  
  
The monster laughed.  
  
 **Hello sister dearest, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.**  
  
She blinked.  
  
 **Lightdancer?**  
  
 **No, child. Worldbreaker. Not the Hammer of Doom but the Breaker of Worlds, a force of destruction with all my higher self's raw invulnerability and the Black Smoke and the family power platter but incapable of being harmed, and more to the point a force that breaks world upon world, now and forever, world without end.**  
  
She smiled with that inhuman aspect and crouched into an animalistic pattern like a panther preparing to spring at her prey, nine suns ignited and then she lunged at Igna of Domdaniel and hurled her through the Temple of Trigon's roof, shattering the wards around the place with trivial ease. The two were hurled high over Gotham, and then the Worldbreaker smiled and slammed her fist into the Azar's head with a thunderclap of force and a following sonic boom that wrecked windows all over the great city.  
  
Igna fell headlong and landed with a tremendous booming impact that cratered the ground and produced major earthquakes. The Worldbreaker stood over her, and then smiled with a terrifying smile and laughed with the eerie sound of wind over the graveyard.  
  
 **Not so fun when it's you on the receiving end, is it you little whiny emo bitch?**  
  
Black smoke wreathed in lightning began to form around her, a dark and gruesome mirror of the Soul-Self wielded by the daughters of Trigon. It cast an eldritch and unnatural light around her face, the monster's high cheekbones illuminated and the laughter that continued to peal in madness growing ever stronger. Igna snarled and then slammed her fist on the ground, the impact channeling the sudden bursts of the Black Smoke and permitting her to teleport over to the Himalayas.  
  
There she was astonished greatly to find a vast Palace and right there waiting for her a monstrously tall figure with dark grey skin and violet eyes, four of them, and a gemstone adorning her forehead. The figure was at least fifteen feet tall, clad in golden armor wreathed in occult symbolism and wielding a gigantic flaming sword proportionate in size.  
  
She said:  
  
 _I am the Gem of Skath's eye, daughter of the Wrath of the First and the Highest. I am the appointed destroyer of the world, harbinger of the end of all things. From the time of my birth, a clock began to chime that was to foretell the end of mankind. I have my Phalanx, my Titans gathered to me as allies, but I have no need of them, beast._  
  
 _I have my own power and my fullness in same, and I need nothing else._  
  
A monstrously clawed gauntlet rose and a sudden column of flame slammed into Igna, who was hurled from the rising palace that was replacing the Himalayas, the Citadel of the End of All Things. As she looked and a shimmering portal behind her formed a monstrous technorganic monstrosity whose metallic half of his face flowed in disgusting simultaneity to his flesh, the monster stood one foot shorter than the Gem who'd casually hurled her down.  
  
Raven smiled at the fallen entity. She knew what the Azar was, either a disgusting image of pacifism or the darker mirror of that pacifism, an immortal entity who purged humanity and all other races of evil at the price of their very souls and independent existence. This was that latter entity, a disgusting offense unto the very existence of all things.  
  
She raised the sword again and then hurled it downward and another spear of flame followed and struck Igna and accelerated her fall with a tremendous explosion of absolute power, and then she hit the ground as the Worldbreaker appeared over her out of a portal of Unlight, standing in midair. With a flourish and a roar of laughter and triumph, the Worldbreaker formed a tremendous column of smoke and collided it into her. The collision hurt and she screamed as a hole formed where a significant portion of her anatomy had been, and the Worldbreaker's foot landed on her throat with a brutal collision that created a shockwave around her.  
  
Her face was a mask of despair and horror, tears starting for the first time in years to flow freely from her eyes as the Azar laughed in power and fury. The Worldbreaker laughed as her boot remained solidly on Igna's neck.  
  
 **Poor little monster, free of your labyrinth only to run into a greater monster. You asked me years ago in torment in Azarath to show you the darkness within my flesh and blood. Now you see it. Now you know it. You FEEL IT, abomination. A wise voice once said not to call up that you cannot put down, and you chose to ignore this. Look upon your works, and know then what it is that those you have harmed have known all our lives.**  
  
The God on the Gilded Throne blinked, a sudden arcing stream of light emanating from her as the stars in several of Azarath's satellite universes blazed with an unnaturally bright and powerful heat. Igna of Domdaniel, crying from the knowledge that the words of the Crawling Chaos had been right all along lay there with armor fractured and spiderwebbed, and then closed her eyes.  
  
The armor shifted and went from very bright green to very dark green and with an unpleasantly organic sound the gauntlets and the boots swelled. The mask of despair and sorrow was replaced with a sudden shark's grin from ear to ear, and a now-bejeweled gauntlet rose into the air as a shimmering energy field with a rumbling aspect appeared around it, raising into the air.  
  
The Azar smiled. Metaphysics be damned. With a wet peeling sound as her lips parted from her teeth, the monster's fist smashed into the ground and she hurled the Worldbreaker off of her.  
  
To her consternation and that of the God on the Gilded Throne the Worldbreaker merely laughed.  
  
 **A worthy foe indeed, a Cosmic virus of Chaos that seeks to drown existence in her own entropy.**  
  
The Azar formed a massive Warhammer out of metal and hurled it straight at the Worldbreaker who casually formed a shield of Black Smoke that corroded the metal of the Warhammer into ash with a sinister laugh.  
  
 **So unimaginative.**  
  
The Worldbreaker then narrowed her glowing eyes.  
  
 **Ah, I spoke too soon.**  
  
Indeed, the foundation beneath the palace was carved with the dreadful twin-headed dragon and the Azar roared in pain as the Worldbreaker hurled Black Smoke in twin columns that tore through her chest and hips and fell through a portal into Earth Four.  
  
As the Worldbreaker levitated up, she looked at her intended Master of Mankind, proud her Gem simply stood impassively, eyes narrowed at the display of fundamental power. A good weapon to loose indeed, a proper harbinger of the apocalypse.  
  
As she moved off, she then returned to Gotham City and the crater where she beheld the Crime Syndicate. Ultraman, Lor-Zod of Krypton, exiled conqueror who'd come to Earth to master it and was indeed ruler of the Western Hemisphere. Superwoman of Themyscira, Zod's consort and champion of Ares the Bloody-Handed One, Power Ring, wielder of a Ring of Fear from the Guardians of Qward, Center of this Universe, Johnny Quick, master of the Speed Force, terror to those who feared he who moved before nerves could react, and Owlman, a man who looked like Batman if he were in love with owls, not bats.  
  
 **What a Nite-Owl,** she smirked.  
  
Ultraman spoke:  
  
"By Rao, that entity was another of your kindred. What in the name of Rao's firey beard is she doing?"  
  
The Worldbreaker smiled.  
  
 **She comes to claim, she comes to sire, mastery of all things mortal and absorption into a future where there is no suffering nor sorrow nor pain nor aging and all that is longs for death and is unable to die in paradise made Hell.**  
  
His eyes narrowed.  
  
"Let me guess, what she did here she's done elsewhere, too."  
  
The Worldbreaker nodded and smiled, saying:  
  
 **I know from whence this springs, and I shall go with the Terminator to the center of all of this. This is a crisis that shall spill over into Infinite Earths if it is not stopped now, and it shall lead to an unusual situation.**  
  
She idly examined her splayed fingers on her right gauntlet, then looked them in the eyes.  
  
 **We all strive to rule the world we live in as tyrants. Now…..we get to be heroes. How…..delightful.**  
  
With a mad cackle she vanished into a sudden column of light.  
  
 **The Church of Blood, Gotham:**  
  
 _In my world, Zatara, you sabotaged the effort of myself and Alidaar and his order to save the world from my father the first time. You led me to a desperate action toward Wallace that I have regretted greatly ever since. To isolation that ended with my destroying the demon Trigon in my world and inheriting all his power and using the might of a being that devours universes to save them. I can rewrite reality's most fundamental rules with a simple thought, Zatara._  
  
As she raised the burning sword toward her face, Zatara finished the runes that would permit Raven to survive a charred and fractured body, undoing the efforts that would keep her from healing. Recognizing this, Redeemer swung the sword down with a sadistic hiss only for Zatara to block it and then to smile as a blue blur hurled downward and Redeemer's eyes widened as a freight train hit her faster than her prescience could do anything effective to counter, the yelp of pain that followed marking her being hurled to the ground.  
  
As Superman levitated over her with his eyes glowing, she hissed and then sheathed the sword, her hands glowing with a hellfire light as she then fired beams at Superman that brought him to his knees before her, and more of the beams at Zatara, who dug her heels into the ground and left grooves as she withstood them with grunts of pain.  
  
Raven feebly and shakily raised herself to her feet, realizing with the voice of her red Emoticlone shrieking in her ear that she'd been manipulated, a terrible psychic-empathic assault that sought to take the very loathing of herself she had and lead her to die without fighting back.  
  
A shield of Soul-Self holding her entrails in her, Raven's eyes split from two to four and for a moment her flesh became not even the massive tentacle monster that was her partially demonic form but the red-skinned white-haired daughter of Trigon, and even then she was wobbling as she spoke an incantation:  
  
 _By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, the Eye of Agamotto and the Winds of Watoomb, I call upon the sacred fires of the Vishanti to banish the demon before me and to cleanse this place of her taints and its own._  
  
Fires erupted, glowing with the eerie Unlight of the Vishanti and as Redeemer yelped in surprise in a different note the fires clung to her and dragged her through the portal, Raven whimpered and then fell to her knees. The spells Zatanna had activated combined with her soul-self to staunch the flow of blood and it was with this knowledge that she fell on her face as the League arrived with teleporters, Darkseid accompanying them out of a premonition that yet another strange visitor from another dimension was en route. Even his cruel heart was horrified at the nature of the injury dealt to Raven, and his eyes widened before that premonition flashed again.  
  
It was then that the skies above Gotham turned crimson and the stars changed. As the skies turned blood red and the stars a hellish gleam of unlight, the Flash spoke amidst the lightning striking the outskirts of Gotham.  
  
"Guys, how's about we back away from the creepy lightning. I've seen this in movies. Either we get fried or we get many-angled and googly-eyed and nasty."  
  
As the League backed away, the skies flashed with that unlight in a dawnless day that was an utter and unremitting light that was not light, something that no closing of eyes or hands in front could shield. Two objects fell from the sky, one in cruciform posture, one falling free.  
  
The League prepared to fly up to rescue them but an invisible force held them arms and legs paralyzed, eyes held open. There was no flame. Objects falling through the atmosphere should show flame, but there was none. They saw the streaks of light and then as the objects blurred and landed, the sonic boom shattered glass around them, the crater shook the ground. Two individuals rose.  
  
One was a towering figure of fourteen feet tall, built like a walking tank. His human flesh was a very dark brown, the half of his face that was still flesh displaying a very prominent Afro, the half that was not with a glowing red eye and a metallic mouth that turned as upward with a sinister smile as the organic part. He was less a man and more someone once human and ascended into a divine tier. And he was very like...  
  
"Cyborg?" Raven's voice broke the awed silence, and he raised himself upward, crossing his arms across his chest.  
  
"No." The voice that spoke had the infrasound echo of a being like the Azar but was a rumbling deep bass that was not something that should have come from a human voice. "I am the Terminator, once Vincent Smith."  
  
The other individual rose. Again they had a familiar impression, someone massively overbuilt and anthropoid, but where the Azar's chief unnatural traits aside from this had been a dish-like face, this one was chalk-hued, like a Bizarro. Nine glowing suns gleamed with unlight, and her mouth was marked from ear to ear with a grin so wide it should have split her lipless mouth in two. A great warhammer was strapped to her back. She'd landed kneeling, a hand with palm upward as though swearing homage, a posture they'd seen before with the Azar.  
  
She rose to her feet.  
  
 **I bring you greetings from Earth-Three. We had an encounter with a being who aims to conquer not simply one world but all of them in one stroke. An aim even the Anti-Monitor would find ambitious.**  
  
Raven's eyes widened at the being who stood equal in height to the Terminator and gazed at him with a strange kind of amusement and affection.  
  
 **The Crime Syndicate of America has appointed me their ambassador, to give you this warning. The crisis is starting with our worlds but shall spread to all of them. Our universe will not die because yours delved into folly.**  
  
The Azar had been a whirlwind in a graveyard, muscles rasping and a psychic assault that scraped bones and nerves raw. The Worldbreaker was a living storm in human form, raw energy that seared eyes and which had a Presence of a different nature. She was graceful, a dancer almost where the Azar was a monstrous war engine that was very powerful and unsubtle. She squatted and then extended herself forward in a three point posture, moves that led the League to pause.  
  
 **They sent me because I can cross between dimensions as others cross streets. Were this any other occasion I would be your enemy and you would not find me an easy force to stop or slow down.**  
  
But she raised herself up with that dancer's grace and levitated slightly with her arms folded across her chest, hissing with malice and pleasure.  
  
 **But a crisis of infinite earths does rather call for extraordinary measures for extraordinary times. If Uxas here can put aside his quest to be lord and god of everything he surveys, I can put aside the hunger that bitch of a sister of mine awakened. For now.**  
  
End of Book I.


	16. At Midnight All the Agents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Book II begins with the Azar's quest across the Fifty-Two worlds in full swing as the Crisis of Infinite Earths dawns. As metahumanity across worlds allies with aliens and dark gods, the scale of the foe that sets herself against all of this begins to become manifest. Can the Unholy Alliance of Good and Evil prevail against the Dark God from Beyond the Stars?

Book II: At Midnight All the Agents

Fair warning: This chapter more than earns the M-rating.

_**The Watchtower:** _

It had been weeks since the terrifying forces of nature known as the Azar and Redeemer had stormed into existence, weeks of hammering out the first stages in a growing and unlikely alliance. Raven, in the wake of the second confrontation with Redeemer had found the stress of the confrontation undid some of her healing magic, probably aided by Redeemer's own sorcery, and she had been laid up in the Watchtower with very little time and a great deal of reading to do.

The Azar's disappearance was followed by a strange quiescence among the villain community, a quiescence that in truth none of the ones joining the alliance really understood. Just because Darkseid was working with Superman, and Lex Luthor, and Grodd didn't obligate the Gotham or Central City Rogues to go underground, but go underground they did. The heroes hardly complained about chances to be normal people for a few weeks, and Raven in turn hardly minded the chance to catch up on her reading.

She was relaxing in the Watchtower main hall reading Arthur Machen's _The Great God Pan_ , getting to the points where Clarke was beginning to investigate the dark and supernatural stories surrounding one Helen Vaughan, a tall and pale brunette sired by the titular entity. Raven did get chills at the description of the pale raven-haired woman in the story, flashes of the heavily armored monster that had skewered her and then faced her team striking her strongly. She shuddered and then closed the book for a moment.

Superman's keen hearing detected this and while there was the odd phenomenon in the training room of the Worldbreaker sparring with Darkseid and the two relishing a confrontation where neither had to hold back and both received the fullest measure of the match, there was also the strangeness of the stoic Raven, the fourteen year old on the League who looked like she'd seen a monster.

He looked at the book she was reading. "The Great God Pan? What's this about?"

Raven looked at Superman with an eyebrow raised and a slightly cryptic smile starting to form.

"A woman gets manipulated into having the spawn of an eldritch demon from beyond. Said spawn is unnaturally beautiful and goes around seducing people with clearly Satanic imagery."

Superman took an unconscious step back with an eyebrow raised.

"You know the silliest bit about this? It's literally a book about a woman who actually likes to have sex and this is what she does with it. At least Wilbur Whateley actually tries to destroy the Earth."

Raven snorted, a strange sound and expression on an otherwise impenetrable mask.

"I mean really, I actually live this life, I should write a story or two like this of my own." She smirked. "Perhaps I might even pitch it to Marvel Comics, call it the 'New Teen Titans.' Featuring Robin, acrobat extraordnaire, Changeling, shapeshifter supreme, Cyborg, half-man, half-Robot, Wonder Girl, adventurer of Themyscira, Starfire, alien warrior and princess, and Raven, mistress of magic."

That strange snort again. "Bah, nobody would ever read a story with that kind of angst and teenage issues. I mean really, can you imagine marketing a story about an alien princess who comes out of slavery and ends up a supermodel and a half-human byproduct of rape who forever angsts about feeling living next to someone who can't do anything but feel? Such a silly concept, it'd never catch on."

Superman raised his own eyebrow. "You've put a lot of thought into this." "Well I was laid up in in the infirmary for weeks after a heavily armored version of me from another world tried to turn me into a shisk kebab. This is what happens when I get bored. Could be worse, I could have gotten into My Little Pony." She shuddered, and so did Superman.

He then looked around with shifty eyes and said "You know who is a fan of that ser-" Batman appeared in the door and mouthed "Tell her I'm a brony and I'll tell her about that Deviantart account, Clark. And Lois, too." He turned pale and as she raised both eyebrows he said "Never mind." Snorting once more Raven resumed reading and couldn't resist a small laugh at the "Ah mother, whyever did you let me go into the woods with Helen" line. After she finished the chapter she grumbled about the misogyny of Arthur Machen and then stood up, stretching.

She was finally and fully healed from the terrible skewering she'd undergone, though it left a monstrous-sized scar on her front and back that was visible in the training room. Surprisingly this meant less than expected in a League where other than Superman and Wonder Woman most of the members were invulnerable or could heal.

As she scratched her back idly, she levitated over to the kitchen to prepare herself some herbal tea, catching a bit of a broadcast about a launch by a private company from Jump City led by Hank Henshaw and a crew of three other people. As she waited on her tea to boil, she smiled to see the Martian Manhunter step in along with Zatanna. Ever since Zatanna had saved her life from her monstrous self from the other universe, the two had begun to develop a deep friendship bonding over daddy issues and being some of the most powerful sorcerers of their dimension. To Zatanna, Raven was a chance to not only teach someone who had enough raw magical ability to be her equal, but to help herself sort through her own daddy issues by knowing someone who understood them all too well.

The two were soon talking about an idea they'd had to watch a movie in the Justice League theater and just hang out. As they'd come to enjoy being their own Mystery Science Theater troupe, they started teasing each other about how that new villain in Jump City, Control Freak, would react to the idea of Justice League members riffing on movies with magic and sorcery.

While it had been mostly quiet, Control Freak was the first new villain to appear in some time anywhere, and he was a villain who was mostly not taken seriously because he was an easily distracted fanboy. Were he more malicious than pathetic he would be one of the more serious threats to come along with his ability to weaponize technology and make it come alive and even transform and his ability to summon monsters out of fiction.

So as Raven and Zatanna debated the merits of watching _Dr. Strange_ or _The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies,_ they savored a chance for normality. It was a chance which unknown to them was near to run its course…..

_**Jump City:** _

In hindsight, there was a bit of warning about how disastrously things might go wrong with Hank Henshaw's _Excalibur_ expedition. It had all started with the very anomaly that he wanted to study, a point in space where the stars had shifted and a blood-red Unlight formed that shifted and became a kaleidoscopic Thing that seemed to pulse and shift and warp in space. It had an organic aspect and that terrified people who looked upon it, because nebulae should simply be balls of gas.

Hank Henshaw, his wife Terri, his friend Benjamin, and Catherine's brother Jacob were the crew for this expedition, and had dubbed themselves Challengers of the Unknown after an old super-science group from the Edwardian era, one of a few precursors of the earliest superheroes. They were more than excited, and as they prepared to take off, they caught a glimpse of the large T in the island outside Jump City with some amusement, Ben saying "You know, why would a team have a headquarters looking like a giant letter in the first place?"

The rockets ignited and the _Excalibur_ and its four crew took off into space.

For their part the Teen Titans were one of the few people in Jump City not focused on the launch, nor were their opponents, specifically the monsters Plasmius and Cinderblock. While Supergirl single-handedly fought Cinderblock and was frustrated that the monster wasn't readily taken down with a single hit, at one point growling "I swear this damn monster is as strong as it needs to be," the rest of the Titans had their hands full with Plasmius, who eluded multiple attacks and attempts to bring him down.

The _Excalibur_ 's heading into space only briefly distracted Supergirl who felt a pang of nostalgia for Krypton that was very poorly timed and led to Cinderblock punching her through three buildings, and then preparing to turn to the Teen Titans still fighting and join Plasmius in taking them down. As Starfire and Cyborg blasted Plasmius and Beast Boy took the form of a Tyrannosaurus rex, roaring and charging straight for it, Robin continued to hurl bird-a-rangs with success even as a blue and red blur smashed into Cinderblock with a streak of red, Supergirl growling "That's enough of this."

Heat vision and a set of rapid-fire super-strong blows toppled Cinderblock and took the monster down, and the Maiden of Might soon joined her fellow teammates in seeking to take down Plasmius. Arrogantly assuming she could just take the monster down with her freezing breath, the monster then hurled bits of acid at her that she dodged before she could exhale, and the team thus spent the better part of an hour working out how to immobilize the man at the monster's heart.

Which in the end boiled down to a triple strike of Starfire, Cyborg, and Supergirl's heat vision focusing the monster's attention and Beast Boy taking the form of a Styracosaurus and knocking the man out with a hammer blow. As they all looked around at each other, Supergirl groaned. "I need a shower in the worst way."

Nodding, they returned to Titans Tower, Beast Boy saying "You know, this whole thing with the space shuttle and the space wedgie reminds me of an episode of Star Trek I watched" to which Cyborg responded "No, I think it's more like 40K." The team was amused listening to the two geeking out as they all took their turns showering and cleaning up.

As Supergirl whirled around and changed into civilian clothes that consisted of shorts and a shirt that said _I went to Coast City and all I got was this lousy T-shirt_ she saw a news report featuring the gigantic humanoid creature in armor that had fought the team and made monkeys out of all of them with trivial difficulty. Though in this case it was footage of the monstrous thing that had called herself the Azar facing the monstrous bat-things that were called Gyaos after an ancient legend, tearing through one of them with a blinding fury.

The twenty-five foot tall monster in armor had instilled a tremendous fear across the world, not least from the direct correlation of her presence and that of strange phenomena in space.

Supergirl, watching footage of the anomaly that the Excalibur was heading to stopped at the same time Robin did, Cyborg a few seconds later, then Starfire froze and her own eyes ignited.

"Space anomalies" they spoke/whispered in a shivering tone that led Garfield to be alone and scratching his head until his eyes went very wide. "Oh shit," and then he rushed out of the Tower to join them.

The _Excalibur_ for their part had found the anomaly just outside the Van Allen radiation belts. It was a circular sphere that seemed to pulse and warp and move with a visceral motion, either an Eye of Terror that blinked and winked, a mouth that gnashed with horrific fanged teeth, or a red-rimmed filter on a beautiful realm of ivory and gold and a Citadel within that realm and a monster on a Gilded Throne there. The anomaly had appeared after Darkseid's return to Earth and starting to work with the Justice League to face phenomena correlated to the gigantic green-armored abomination that had appeared in Gotham and Jump City.

They entered the anomaly in serenity, and then within the red Eye there was a brilliant and beautiful gold, and a sound that echoed into their very minds. Golden light infiltrated every corner of the _Excalibur_ , the crew rooted in their seats as the light began to search for them and then speared into them and moved not like photons but like the animate tendrils of a monster.

Sickly green energy manifested behind them, the shuttle bloating enough for the raw presence of the twenty-five foot tall monstrosity forming behind them to stand in full height, a staff of silvery metal marked with various runes and occult symbols emerging out of flowing and warping and wending around it. The creature smiled. The glorified couch potato showed humanity could provide its own predators without her, but with Luthor and Darkseid and even Grodd working with the League there were fewer others to provide distractions.

Few, but not none. While her power animated anew a monster from the corpse of Cyrus Gold the Azar smiled at the crew of the ship, frozen in place and wanting to scream and even in a few cases with mouths frozen in howls of shrieking agony that would tear their vocal cords had they been able to use them. The staff rose and then slammed onto the floor behind them and the light that stabbed through them coursed through every single one of their arteries and veins, and then with that the monster casually clenched a fist and brought the Excalibur through the Van Allen belt and then hurled it to Earth as she phased through with that unnatural leer on her face.

The _Excalibur_ began to fall to the Earth burning and glowing with the eerie light of the Van Allen belts clinging to it, and it was when Supergirl and Starfire stared pole-axed and pointed that Robin shouted "Titans Go!" Supergirl and Starfire took off to bring the shuttle safely, while Robin pointed to Cyborg and Beast Boy to get the civilians gawking around at it out of the way. As the shuttle fell the traces of the glowing light dissipated and the crew began to scream with the horrors of the transformations ensuing and their spacesuits fell apart for the experimental molecular blue suits Henshaw had made, and in one case the suit erupted as flesh began to transform into something very like rocks.

By careful partnership Supergirl and Starfire lowered the shuttle down and then backed up, Supergirl's X-ray vision inconsistent. At times it worked but fuzzily and then the ship was impenetrable and like it was wreathed in gold. Then all of a sudden it was crystal clear and she was nauseous enough she hovered over to a garbage can and lost her lunch. The rest of the team cautiously backed up a bit at whatever would make a Kryptonian do this when a sudden banging sound echoed within the charred detritus of the shuttle. Unknown to them a flash of golden light occurred to their right and a strange figure of a brown-skinned man with long hair and glowing golden eyes appeared and then carefully re-established the glamor of normality, deciding to observe carefully lest the Primordial Annihilator show too many cards too soon.

Four more bangs followed and impressions of monstrous knuckles came with them, then one final bang and a significant portion of the top was hurled off and caught by Supergirl, who dropped it on Titans Island for lack of a better place to put it. When she returned she saw the rest of the team staring dumbfounded, and while her hearing detected….oddities….in the steps of all of them it was when she turned around that her own jaw fell.

Hank Henshaw was wavering, his flesh beginning to run down his body like a scene from a bad sci-fi film involving Harrison Ford she'd seen, his wife was invisible at points and simultaneously seemingly a tall woman with armor vaguely visible beneath a hood and cloak that reminded her of Raven somewhat and a monstrous creature with bat-like wings and a gigantic black sword encrusted in runes, her brother was a glowing man who burned with light bright enough they held their eyes against them, and the pilot was a monstrous man whose flesh had become something like rock with two balefires where his eyes had been.

Dr. Henshaw then fell and a strange body of light erupted from his back and launched down south of Titans Tower. Supergirl recognized the trajectory and suddenly went very, very pale. And swore like a sailor in Kryptonian. As Starfire raised an eyebrow she wagged a finger indicating for her not to throw stones in glass houses and zoomed into the Tower and then into the elevator, cursing propriety.

Dr, Henshaw's consciousness found the thing calling to him. A golden device shaped like a 50s B-movie starship, the doomsday weapon from an ancient Kryptonian civil war over the rights of clones. As his astral self looked at it, the Eradicator seemed in spite of being faceless to grin with malice.

_Rao has gifted me._ With these words and extensions of light Hank Henshaw felt himself being remade and screamed on a wholly different note audible to Supergirl, who in turn prepared for the worst before seeing something that awed her on a vastly different note to the kind she was used to seeing.

Hank Henshaw was there and he wasn't. The flesh that looked at her resembled if anything more her cousin at points, but enfused by metal that made up half or more of his flesh. Like Victor Stone, like Kal.

"A Cyborg-Superman," she breathed in awe as he looked at her and said "Help me," before trying to walk and passing out in her arms. Carrying him bridal-style in her arms she entered the elevator and they began the long road up to Titans Tower's ground floor….


	17. Doom am I Become:

Book II: At Midnight All the Agents

Fair warning: This chapter more than earns the M-rating.

_**The Watchtower:** _

It had been weeks since the terrifying forces of nature known as the Azar and Redeemer had stormed into existence, weeks of hammering out the first stages in a growing and unlikely alliance. Raven, in the wake of the second confrontation with Redeemer had found the stress of the confrontation undid some of her healing magic, probably aided by Redeemer's own sorcery, and she had been laid up in the Watchtower with very little time and a great deal of reading to do.

The Azar's disappearance was followed by a strange quiescence among the villain community, a quiescence that in truth none of the ones joining the alliance really understood. Just because Darkseid was working with Superman, and Lex Luthor, and Grodd didn't obligate the Gotham or Central City Rogues to go underground, but go underground they did. The heroes hardly complained about chances to be normal people for a few weeks, and Raven in turn hardly minded the chance to catch up on her reading.

She was relaxing in the Watchtower main hall reading Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, getting to the points where Clarke was beginning to investigate the dark and supernatural stories surrounding one Helen Vaughan, a tall and pale brunette sired by the titular entity. Raven did get chills at the description of the pale raven-haired woman in the story, flashes of the heavily armored monster that had skewered her and then faced her team striking her strongly. She shuddered and then closed the book for a moment.

Superman's keen hearing detected this and while there was the odd phenomenon in the training room of the Worldbreaker sparring with Darkseid and the two relishing a confrontation where neither had to hold back and both received the fullest measure of the match, there was also the strangeness of the stoic Raven, the fourteen year old on the League who looked like she'd seen a monster.

He looked at the book she was reading. "The Great God Pan? What's this about?"

Raven looked at Superman with an eyebrow raised and a slightly cryptic smile starting to form.

"A woman gets manipulated into having the spawn of an eldritch demon from beyond. Said spawn is unnaturally beautiful and goes around seducing people with clearly Satanic imagery."

Superman took an unconscious step back with an eyebrow raised.

"You know the silliest bit about this? It's literally a book about a woman who actually likes to have sex and this is what she does with it. At least Wilbur Whateley actually tries to destroy the Earth."

Raven snorted, a strange sound and expression on an otherwise impenetrable mask.

"I mean really, I actually live this life, I should write a story or two like this of my own." She smirked. "Perhaps I might even pitch it to Marvel Comics, call it the 'New Teen Titans.' Featuring Robin, acrobat extraordnaire, Changeling, shapeshifter supreme, Cyborg, half-man, half-Robot, Wonder Girl, adventurer of Themyscira, Starfire, alien warrior and princess, and Raven, mistress of magic."

That strange snort again. "Bah, nobody would ever read a story with that kind of angst and teenage issues. I mean really, can you imagine marketing a story about an alien princess who comes out of slavery and ends up a supermodel and a half-human byproduct of rape who forever angsts about feeling living next to someone who can't do anything but feel? Such a silly concept, it'd never catch on."

Superman raised his own eyebrow. "You've put a lot of thought into this." "Well I was laid up in in the infirmary for weeks after a heavily armored version of me from another world tried to turn me into a shisk kebab. This is what happens when I get bored. Could be worse, I could have gotten into My Little Pony." She shuddered, and so did Superman.

He then looked around with shifty eyes and said "You know who is a fan of that ser-" Batman appeared in the door and mouthed "Tell her I'm a brony and I'll tell her about that Deviantart account, Clark. And Lois, too." He turned pale and as she raised both eyebrows he said "Never mind." Snorting once more Raven resumed reading and couldn't resist a small laugh at the "Ah mother, whyever did you let me go into the woods with Helen" line. After she finished the chapter she grumbled about the misogyny of Arthur Machen and then stood up, stretching.

She was finally and fully healed from the terrible skewering she'd undergone, though it left a monstrous-sized scar on her front and back that was visible in the training room. Surprisingly this meant less than expected in a League where other than Superman and Wonder Woman most of the members were invulnerable or could heal.

As she scratched her back idly, she levitated over to the kitchen to prepare herself some herbal tea, catching a bit of a broadcast about a launch by a private company from Jump City led by Hank Henshaw and a crew of three other people. As she waited on her tea to boil, she smiled to see the Martian Manhunter step in along with Zatanna. Ever since Zatanna had saved her life from her monstrous self from the other universe, the two had begun to develop a deep friendship bonding over daddy issues and being some of the most powerful sorcerers of their dimension. To Zatanna, Raven was a chance to not only teach someone who had enough raw magical ability to be her equal, but to help herself sort through her own daddy issues by knowing someone who understood them all too well.

The two were soon talking about an idea they'd had to watch a movie in the Justice League theater and just hang out. As they'd come to enjoy being their own Mystery Science Theater troupe, they started teasing each other about how that new villain in Jump City, Control Freak, would react to the idea of Justice League members riffing on movies with magic and sorcery.

While it had been mostly quiet, Control Freak was the first new villain to appear in some time anywhere, and he was a villain who was mostly not taken seriously because he was an easily distracted fanboy. Were he more malicious than pathetic he would be one of the more serious threats to come along with his ability to weaponize technology and make it come alive and even transform and his ability to summon monsters out of fiction.

So as Raven and Zatanna debated the merits of watching _Dr. Strange_ or _The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies,_ they savored a chance for normality. It was a chance which unknown to them was near to run its course…..

_**Jump City:** _

In hindsight, there was a bit of warning about how disastrously things might go wrong with Hank Henshaw's _Excalibur_ expedition. It had all started with the very anomaly that he wanted to study, a point in space where the stars had shifted and a blood-red Unlight formed that shifted and became a kaleidoscopic Thing that seemed to pulse and shift and warp in space. It had an organic aspect and that terrified people who looked upon it, because nebulae should simply be balls of gas.

Hank Henshaw, his wife Terri, his friend Benjamin, and Catherine's brother Jacob were the crew for this expedition, and had dubbed themselves Challengers of the Unknown after an old super-science group from the Edwardian era, one of a few precursors of the earliest superheroes. They were more than excited, and as they prepared to take off, they caught a glimpse of the large T in the island outside Jump City with some amusement, Ben saying "You know, why would a team have a headquarters looking like a giant letter in the first place?"

The rockets ignited and the _Excalibur_ and its four crew took off into space.

For their part the Teen Titans were one of the few people in Jump City not focused on the launch, nor were their opponents, specifically the monsters Plasmius and Cinderblock. While Supergirl single-handedly fought Cinderblock and was frustrated that the monster wasn't readily taken down with a single hit, at one point growling "I swear this damn monster is as strong as it needs to be," the rest of the Titans had their hands full with Plasmius, who eluded multiple attacks and attempts to bring him down.

The _Excalibur_ 's heading into space only briefly distracted Supergirl who felt a pang of nostalgia for Krypton that was very poorly timed and led to Cinderblock punching her through three buildings, and then preparing to turn to the Teen Titans still fighting and join Plasmius in taking them down. As Starfire and Cyborg blasted Plasmius and Beast Boy took the form of a Tyrannosaurus rex, roaring and charging straight for it, Robin continued to hurl bird-a-rangs with success even as a blue and red blur smashed into Cinderblock with a streak of red, Supergirl growling "That's enough of this."

Heat vision and a set of rapid-fire super-strong blows toppled Cinderblock and took the monster down, and the Maiden of Might soon joined her fellow teammates in seeking to take down Plasmius. Arrogantly assuming she could just take the monster down with her freezing breath, the monster then hurled bits of acid at her that she dodged before she could exhale, and the team thus spent the better part of an hour working out how to immobilize the man at the monster's heart.

Which in the end boiled down to a triple strike of Starfire, Cyborg, and Supergirl's heat vision focusing the monster's attention and Beast Boy taking the form of a Styracosaurus and knocking the man out with a hammer blow. As they all looked around at each other, Supergirl groaned. "I need a shower in the worst way."

Nodding, they returned to Titans Tower, Beast Boy saying "You know, this whole thing with the space shuttle and the space wedgie reminds me of an episode of Star Trek I watched" to which Cyborg responded "No, I think it's more like 40K." The team was amused listening to the two geeking out as they all took their turns showering and cleaning up.

As Supergirl whirled around and changed into civilian clothes that consisted of shorts and a shirt that said _I went to Coast City and all I got was this lousy T-shirt_ she saw a news report featuring the gigantic humanoid creature in armor that had fought the team and made monkeys out of all of them with trivial difficulty. Though in this case it was footage of the monstrous thing that had called herself the Azar facing the monstrous bat-things that were called Gyaos after an ancient legend, tearing through one of them with a blinding fury.

The fourteen foot tall monster in armor had instilled a tremendous fear across the world, not least from the direct correlation of her presence and that of strange phenomena in space.

Supergirl, watching footage of the anomaly that the Excalibur was heading to stopped at the same time Robin did, Cyborg a few seconds later, then Starfire froze and her own eyes ignited.

"Space anomalies" they spoke/whispered in a shivering tone that led Garfield to be alone and scratching his head until his eyes went very wide. "Oh shit," and then he rushed out of the Tower to join them.

The _Excalibur_ for their part had found the anomaly just outside the Van Allen radiation belts. It was a circular sphere that seemed to pulse and warp and move with a visceral motion, either an Eye of Terror that blinked and winked, a mouth that gnashed with horrific fanged teeth, or a red-rimmed filter on a beautiful realm of ivory and gold and a Citadel within that realm and a monster on a Gilded Throne there. The anomaly had appeared after Darkseid's return to Earth and starting to work with the Justice League to face phenomena correlated to the gigantic green-armored abomination that had appeared in Gotham and Jump City.

They entered the anomaly in serenity, and then within the red Eye there was a brilliant and beautiful gold, and a sound that echoed into their very minds. Golden light infiltrated every corner of the _Excalibur_ , the crew rooted in their seats as the light began to search for them and then speared into them and moved not like photons but like the animate tendrils of a monster.

Sickly green energy manifested behind them, the shuttle bloating enough for the raw presence of the fourteen foot tall monstrosity forming behind them to stand in full height, a staff of silvery metal marked with various runes and occult symbols emerging out of flowing and warping and wending around it. The creature smiled. The glorified couch potato showed humanity could provide its own predators without her, but with Luthor and Darkseid and even Grodd working with the League there were fewer others to provide distractions.

Few, but not none. While her power animated anew a monster from the corpse of Cyrus Gold the Azar smiled at the crew of the ship, frozen in place and wanting to scream and even in a few cases with mouths frozen in howls of shrieking agony that would tear their vocal cords had they been able to use them. The staff rose and then slammed onto the floor behind them and the light that stabbed through them coursed through every single one of their arteries and veins, and then with that the monster casually clenched a fist and brought the Excalibur through the Van Allen belt and then hurled it to Earth as she phased through with that unnatural leer on her face.

The _Excalibur_ began to fall to the Earth burning and glowing with the eerie light of the Van Allen belts clinging to it, and it was when Supergirl and Starfire stared pole-axed and pointed that Robin shouted "Titans Go!" Supergirl and Starfire took off to bring the shuttle safely, while Robin pointed to Cyborg and Beast Boy to get the civilians gawking around at it out of the way. As the shuttle fell the traces of the glowing light dissipated and the crew began to scream with the horrors of the transformations ensuing and their spacesuits fell apart for the experimental molecular blue suits Henshaw had made, and in one case the suit erupted as flesh began to transform into something very like rocks.

By careful partnership Supergirl and Starfire lowered the shuttle down and then backed up, Supergirl's X-ray vision inconsistent. At times it worked but fuzzily and then the ship was impenetrable and like it was wreathed in gold. Then all of a sudden it was crystal clear and she was nauseous enough she hovered over to a garbage can and lost her lunch. The rest of the team cautiously backed up a bit at whatever would make a Kryptonian do this when a sudden banging sound echoed within the charred detritus of the shuttle. Unknown to them a flash of golden light occurred to their right and a strange figure of a brown-skinned man with long hair and glowing golden eyes appeared and then carefully re-established the glamor of normality, deciding to observe carefully lest the Primordial Annihilator show too many cards too soon.

Four more bangs followed and impressions of monstrous knuckles came with them, then one final bang and a significant portion of the top was hurled off and caught by Supergirl, who dropped it on Titans Island for lack of a better place to put it. When she returned she saw the rest of the team staring dumbfounded, and while her hearing detected….oddities….in the steps of all of them it was when she turned around that her own jaw fell.

Hank Henshaw was wavering, his flesh beginning to run down his body like a scene from a bad sci-fi film involving Harrison Ford she'd seen, his wife was invisible at points and simultaneously seemingly a tall woman with armor vaguely visible beneath a hood and cloak that reminded her of Raven somewhat and a monstrous creature with bat-like wings and a gigantic black sword encrusted in runes, her brother was a glowing man who burned with light bright enough they held their eyes against them, and the pilot was a monstrous man whose flesh had become something like rock with two balefires where his eyes had been.

Dr. Henshaw then fell and a strange body of light erupted from his back and launched down south of Titans Tower. Supergirl recognized the trajectory and suddenly went very, very pale. And swore like a sailor in Kryptonian. As Starfire raised an eyebrow she wagged a finger indicating for her not to throw stones in glass houses and zoomed into the Tower and then into the elevator, cursing propriety.

Dr, Henshaw's consciousness found the thing calling to him. A golden device shaped like a 50s B-movie starship, the doomsday weapon from an ancient Kryptonian civil war over the rights of clones. As his astral self looked at it, the Eradicator seemed in spite of being faceless to grin with malice.

_Rao has gifted me._ With these words and extensions of light Hank Henshaw felt himself being remade and screamed on a wholly different note audible to Supergirl, who in turn prepared for the worst before seeing something that awed her on a vastly different note to the kind she was used to seeing.

Hank Henshaw was there and he wasn't. The flesh that looked at her resembled if anything more her cousin at points, but enfused by metal that made up half or more of his flesh. Like Victor Stone, like Kal.

"A Cyborg-Superman," she breathed in awe as he looked at her and said "Help me," before trying to walk and passing out in her arms. Carrying him bridal-style in her arms she entered the elevator and they began the long road up to Titans Tower's ground floor….


	18. Becoming Death to the Worlds, Engaged in Devouring Mankind:

**The Watchtower:**

Raven looked cautiously at the two monsters who'd appeared from what they called Earth-Three. For two dark god-like figures of a world of supervillains the Worldbreaker and the Terminator had been surprisingly quiet and calm, though they regularly demolished the Manhunter, Superman, and Darkseid in the sparring rings without breaking a sweat, smiling cryptically and saying that they simply cheated and didn't hold back because they were villains as though this explained everything.

In his vast technoorganic form, the Terminator would have reminded Vic of what he called Obliterators, a Chaos faction he took a twisted amusement in making his favorite faction to play in the 40K video games he had. She could understand this, they were gargantuan monstrosities who manufactured their own weapons and were both machine and man. If he was akin to them, the Terminator gave them full credit, as he was at least equal in height to the Worldbreaker, quite a bit more robust. More a tank in human form than a man, though he gave every sign of having been a man, once.

His skin was a far darker brown than Green Lantern's, and it seemed he was rather more flesh than Vic Stone, and that the metal that flowed to conceal his body entirely in armor at points was literally both in and yet not of it. He was always watching like a twisted version of Big Brother, and she had a feeling that glowing red eyes of his saw a great deal more than he let on.

The Worldbreaker reminded her of the monster in her dreams, the perversion of the ideals of Azarath she was taught. Yet that Azar was like a flaying knife that ripped off skin and left the oozing muscle to shriek, the Worldbreaker was the elemental power of a storm and a supernova bound into quasi-human form. It was a psionic and empathic set of sledgehammers to the face, and it didn't help that in her armor and cape she gave every indication of being like the Astartes Vic loved to annoy Beast Boy by talking about.

A God in the form of a woman, a chalk-skinned abomination whose nine eyes were a source of fear. Yet…Raven remembered at one point in Azarath when she'd reached the depths of despair. The night Azar had died and her mother had tried to speak to her as her mother and broken down bawling at realizing Raven barely knew her. And Raven herself had broken down as well, remembering the pain she'd given her mom from the very moment of conception.

So she'd gone to her room, and found a blade encrusted with salt and prepared to stab herself through the skull, when she'd seen a woman in black who looked she realized with a strange kind of horror very like the Worldbreaker appear. Only she had two eyes, of dark black hue and she'd been an amazing friend and someone of comfort who appeared to her from time to time. She'd convinced her not to take the plunge, telling her if it did all she'd do is fail and she'd learn how painful it is to long for death and be unable to die. They'd hugged and she'd learned this was Death, eldest sister of the Endless, the personifications of mortal thought and will.

The Worldbreaker was that woman of grace and beauty and refinement swollen and made monstrous, her ears tapering to long points as the only major gulf with Death of the Endless, though she did share the monstrously oversized smile with her sister. Not a Reaper in dark clothes who was a great friend welcoming people to the Sunless lands, a monstrous force clad in plate. A thing of horror made to wade across worlds reaving them and leaving piles of the slain, relishing in the feeling of blood across her face.

She looked over, seeing the otherwise-incongruous sight of Superman and Darkseid poring over material in the Necronomicon that discussed the Undying Flame. Superman, like Starfire in Jump City, was a towering pillar of light and hope, a blue candle that ignited stars by his presence. A god in power with the humility of a man, the Moses from Krypton. Darkseid was the eldritch force of a glowing singularity, where all that was good went to die, yet he was less overtly destructive than the Azar or the Worldbreaker, for their malice seemed to ooze so tangibly even non-empaths reacted like the auras were visible. Darkseid, like her father…..he was. He was of the multiverse as they knew it, and his darkness had its own role to play, however horrible the consequences. And in his own fashion he wanted to rule, not to simply preside over graves.

When the Worldbreaker began her meditation and relied on a mantra that to her dawning horror was of Azarathi origin, her cape drooped behind her, Raven jolted a bit. A half-human monster bathed in blood from another dimension who was pale and dark-haired and oozed power like a thunderclap designed to end worlds?

"Ah mother, why did you let me go in the woods with Helen," she muttered and then headed off to speak to Zatanna and to train elsewhere. As she left, one of the nine eyes opened and a thin beam of light seemed to zero in on Raven and the Worldbreaker smiled. For a portal in human form whose powers relied on controlling her emotions that one was easily rattled. Then that eye narrowed. That was a weakness, potentially a fatal one.

Her meditation ceased and the monster lowered herself to her feet, and her fourteen foot tall form blurred and then appeared in front of Raven, whose 5'4'' height was outmatched by the fourteen foot tall figure in armor who blocked her with an arm and that cape. The shark-grin crossed her face.

_**So, I see you're going off to talk to others.** _

Raven snarled.

"I am going to speak to a friend. I don't know what you are, but you are not a friend." Turning black and intending to phase through the Worldbreaker she yelped in pain and held her nose. Grateful her healing powers meant no broken nose lasted, the monster stood at her full height and crossed her arms in a Superman-like gesture. This close the empathic sledgehammer was even more overwhelming and she literally whimpered as a flashback came to Azarath and when she'd lose control there and the monks would, vow of non-violence be damned, strike her like an animal.

Those suns burned her with the intensity of their gaze.

_**You lose control of your emotions and your power slips because they taught you nothing of control. They shattered your mind via a spell that would offend even the monster that is the Azar, though in her case due to the wasteful excesses and no moral outrage. In my case-**_ the monstrous gauntlet extended and a single finger held her eyes locked with the glowing golden eyes of the other woman- _ **it is because I believe no child should be taught such methods, for they create problems and do not resolve them.**_

Raven blinked.

"My destin-"

_**That cannot be stopped.**_ The infrasound was soft and almost sympathetic, and then the monster continued:

_**But consider. The Spectre, Wrath of God, will be here as will be Zauriel, Heaven's enforcer to fight this monster. They are not here for you.** _

She stopped short.

"W-what?"

_**You speak of your destiny and your future, but none of the appointed architects of multiversal justice turn on you for it.** _

The monster leaned down, kneeling in front of her and placed those monstrously oversized gauntlets on her shoulders. For a moment she seemed to subtly shift as though some higher force were active and while still a sledgehammer it was one that protected and guarded.

_**There will always be people who hate and fear what they don't understand, but realize this. Zatanna Zatara, in many worlds, she drives you to homelessness and desperation and then Starfire falls from the heavens and you join your only family that exists. This is not that world.** _

She smiled, then, a strangely human gesture that was not monstrous but instead of being a shark's grin gave a paradoxical resemblance to her dear friend Death.

_**And if she accepts you, and the Batman accept you, you can and you should accept yourself.** _

She smiled and then stood up and while the return to the monstrous threatening living storm occurred as though the other never existed, the towering presence was far less intimidating.

_**You won't die at sixteen, Raven. But you will face a choice, you will become the true Gem of Trigon, his appointed champion and ravager of worlds, an Archfiend who unlike the rest of your kind can manifest temporally and initiate the destruction and conquest of world upon world, or one day, when all hope seems lost, when the God of Pandaemonium has leveled the planet to ashes and those you leave alive in attempts to stop it have fallen, you shall find within yourself an answer as to your future, and it shall continue and you shall have your whole life ahead of you.** _

_**In the end, daughter of Angela Roth of Gotham, there is no end, just a turning of the wheel and when it turns and you stand there, when he asks you what hope the creation has to turn upon her creator with expectation to win, know this. You are as strong as he is, if not moreso, but you shall find within yourself something he lacks.** _

The Worldbreaker placed a single finger right at her heart, hearing the thumping of it as Raven stared at her eyes wide and tears threatening to fall.

_**Love, compassion. Humanity. You are not simply a weapon, not simply a demon in plain sight that exists to burn worlds to ashes. You can be so much more, and this is what the League shall show you in its own way different to the Titans. Right now, they are a team to you. In time they shall be a family, and in time, you shall take your own steps to live your own life, whatever those choices may be.** _

And as the monster stood back up she grinned and then the shark's grin split her face in two again.

_**I would not deprive myself of one of my only worthy opponents in this world because she makes herself more isolated and more vulnerable than she has to be.** _

She then began to move and spoke one last line before a flash of precognition led her to pause.

_**Consider, child of Trigon, whenever you experience your positive emotions with your family and let them out you destroy nothing. You can feel without bringing on destruction and if you learn how to do it, that will give your creator one less weapon to wield against you.** _

**Jump City:**

The transformed survivors of the Excalibur sat in Titans Tower gazing in awe and horror at each other. A specialized suit designed by Cyborg encased Jacob and prevented his radiation from reaching fatal levels, Ben stood as a tall and monstrous figure of hewn rock, Terri flickered in and out of appearance as a woman, that strange vaguely Raven-like figure or the monstrous horned red thing with jaws that never shut. And Hank Henshaw looked like Superman and the Terminator had a lovechild.

It was, of course, Beast Boy who broke the silence of people staring at each other with a perfect summation. Rubbing the back of his neck, he said "So…..this is as awkward as it could be."

Hank Henshaw nodded.

"This is certainly not what we expected I'll say that much."

He looked to his team and then smiled fondly.

"I believe we'll return to Freedom Plaza and rename it after our….transformation. From Freedom Plaza to Four Freedom Plaza."

As the team rose to their feet, he bowed formally in front of Supergirl.

"Thank you for saving me, daughter of Zor-El, I shall be forever in your debt."

She blinked. He'd spoken to her in not only Kryptonian but pure Argosian, a language she'd thought lost with the last of the Kryptonians. Staring blankly, she watched as the team moved, the Cyborg Superman holding Ben in his hands the way Starfire held Cyborg, the rest of the team flying off. For a moment his wife looked not human at all but like an incarnate force of malice with great bat-wings of concentrated electroplasm that beat with the whisking sound of artillery and the thunderclap of sheer concentrated wrath, but then she was a hovering figure visible by distortions around her laughing in the sheer joy of flight.

The Titans just looked at each other with eyebrows raised.

**Metropolis, Superman Memorial Park:**

If asked to define the nature of his transformation, the newly reborn Atomic Skull in truth could not have given an answer. He had been a normal man who'd had a deep and abiding obsession with the titular monster of the television series, a villain protagonist who leveled cities casually with gazes and blasts of terrifyingly potent radiation. He'd wondered longingly about having such power when a figure materialized in front of him clad in dark green armor with a bright blue cape, the breastplate marked by a crude and yet moving oddly stylized dragon. Her face was dish-like, her irises patterned like a crystal with a fractal pattern not at all natural.

Already fourteen feet tall and seemingly still larger within the armor, her gauntlets and boots were more massive with an effect that should have been ridiculous on its face. Instead it gave a latent impression of unrelenting and remorseless force, a psychic flaying knife that carved into souls and cared not from whence the pain came, only that it did. The entity raised her right gauntlet, and five rings began to spark with light and bright golden and ivory energy surged into him and he screamed in awe and horror.

Then darkness swallowed him and then his flesh swelled up in a fashion like a decaying corpse before being remade as glowing burning radiation. His clothes were replaced by the immense armor suit of his favorite Atomic Skull and he felt a surge of awe-inspiring and deadly force overwhelm him. His most sacred dream fulfilled.

Laughing in delight he unleashed a wave of radiation and heat that melted his house and burned it down all around him, and when the delight faded he saw the bodies of his family and his dog, the animal dead and frozen in fear, burns covering them, their shadows scarred into the ground. He screamed in agony then and erupted out through Suicide Slum leaving a trail of fire and doom in his wake.

Something had laughed then with a voice cold and cruel and inhumanly prone to reverberation and then a set of Boom Tubes opened. A Justice League task force, a test of the new alliance. The team's youngest member, the little demon-brat (how he knew the fourteen year old was a demon he did not know and the human part of him began to realize with a sick horror just what kind of transformation he'd undergone and beat vainly against the rebuilt monster), Orion, son of Darkseid, Gorilla Grodd, Superman, naturally, and the Martian Manhunter.

A tremendously powerful strike force of known quantities save the demon-brat, but the force that had remade him was one that casually weighed universes like marbles and given him a power akin to that of deities, and it was with the greatest of delight he ran forward and smashed into a very surprised Orion, colliding into him with a tackle that would have been illegal in every version of football known to man and several that weren't. The impact produced a massive sonic boom and launched Orion back on his back, followed by the Atomic Skull raising his hands together for a thunderous impact on the god's skull, only for Orion to dodge it and then hurl the Skull back.

Snarling, he was then slammed simultaneously by Superman and the Manhunter, Superman grasping his right arm and the Manhunter the left. As Raven supervised the evacuation of civilians, the monster that had been a man howled in rage:

_**There shall be no peace among the stars, only slaughter and the laughter of thirsting Gods**_!

With that he threw off both of them, hurling them simultaneously through buildings as Grodd unleashed a roiling wave of telepathic force. Finding the man within the monster and realizing he was struggling, Grodd laughed with a low and rumbling sound and began to augment the man's struggles. The monster stood still and then fell to his knees howling at a voice in his head only he could hear, and as Raven's teleportation managed to move civilians out of the way to a point that the neighborhood was evacuated for a range of several miles, the monster flared over the man sufficient to launch an incomplete and half-assed lunge at Grodd rumbling in anger.

It was then that one seeming civilian revealed himself out of the alley between the building that Superman had been hurled into and a bank.

With the visage of someone out of time, he smiled and began to recite a rhyme:

_Yarva Daemonicus Etrigan!_

_Change Change the Form of Man,_

_Free the Prince Forever Damned,_

_Boil the Might in Heart of Fire,_

_Unleash the Strength in Fleshly Mire,_

_Gone Gone O Form of Man,_

_Rise the Demon Etrigan!_

A balefire light surrounded him and instantaneously where a man had stood rose the massive hulking form of the Demon Etrigan, an orange being with two glowing red eyes, finned ears, and massive drooling fangs.

"A city leave ye in ruins man of flame, I am here to teach ye the meaning of shame."

Etrigan then moved with his own blinding speed and slammed into the Atomic Skull with an even more brutal tackle than that used on Orion, complete with a set of rapid-fire punches to the Atomic Skull's gonads. Even a cosmic alteration by a dark god couldn't protect testicles from multiple lightning-fast blows of strength on par with Superman and the Skull roared in an altogether human note of pain before moving with his own speed to grasp Etrigan's arm with both his hands and whirl Etrigan around and slam him into the moving form of Orion.

As Superman and the Manhunter nodded and began to move around the monster with super-strong blows of super-fast speed, Raven materialized out of the bird-like form of her soul-self, and then decided to experiment with something. Focusing her fear of the strange radiation-prone monster, she smiled with a sudden demonic leer when that anger took on a form that to her was strangely aesthetically pleasing.

A figure like herself but with the Runes that marked the arrival of Trigon and the Portal-Spell carbonized, in leathery-like armor with a black cape. A figure of flowing darkness that maneuvered like the darkness was a tangible substance and as that river of literal shadow flowed up to the Atomic Skull and formed another combatant whose eyes glowed with a terrible flame.

Infrasound reverberations echoed from the construct's voice:

_**I am the shadow on the moon at night that fills your dreams to the brim with fright!** _

Joining in Grodd's telepathic attack, the combined force brought the Skull to his knees as Superman and the Manhunter held down his arms again and placed their feet on his legs and stepped with iron force and will, and the combined assault finally forced him down and he passed out, the Skull's flames burning somewhat more dully but no less powerfully for the unconsciousness.

Superman looked at Etrigan.

"Why are you here?"

The question which would otherwise have been something of hostility and likeliness to provoke a fight was followed by Etrigan looking at Raven.

"To the fair city have I come but to see, one of blood and kindred who is dear to me."

He pointed at Raven who blinked.

"OK what?"

"By blood of my father of one kindred are we, children of Hell together and free."

He grinned and then spoke:

"Birds of a feather do flock together."

She winced:

"Can't you do anything but rhyme?"

Etrigan laughed.

"Rhyming Lords have power to bind and to loose, to leash lords and execute traitor in noose.

Of one flesh are you and I, children of Trigon, Lord of Hell's land, sea, and sky."

Then Raven blinked once more.

"Which one?"

Etrigan smiled.

"Belial, father of the lie is my father, to him I am apple of his eye."

She sighed in relief.

"At least it's not Suge. Bastard."

The League raised eyebrows, all of them. Even Grodd, who had a fairly impressive look of skepticism for a gorilla in a glorified hairnet.

"Long story, explain at the Watchtower."

"And I an explanation to give have as well, and a story that must be told of dark deeds and gambits in Hell."

The teleportation locus fixed and with a flash of light they went with the unconscious Skull taken along for the ride to a comfortable cell.

**Earth Seven:**

The Azar of Azarath smiled. After Earth Three there had been three more worlds and two more brawls, most of them much easier. Earth-Five had been a world of surprising lack of hindrance, perhaps not unconnected to the ongoing strife connected to the assault by the Dominus of Hell, Neron, upon the realms of mortals and Heaven. This, however, this was a world of pure mystic power. And this was a world she'd looked forward to with delight, one that could even pose a potential point of full focus for the God on the Gilded Throne.

Hovering over the Himalayas she began the incantation that would mark this world among others when she heard the hypersonic arrival of this world's version of-Superman. But a Superman marked with the taint of the House of Trigon. That contradiction led to her pausing the spell at a safe point to do so, as she saw him began an incantation that led her eyes to narrow. That explained things.

"Change Change Form of Kryptonian, Rise the Demon Etrigan!'

A blinding flash of light and the flesh of Kal-El of Krypton was infused with the power of the nephew of Trigon, Lord of the Malebolge. An Etrigan whose already-massive strength and raw force were augmented by the godlike power of Jor-El's Moses. A delightful blasphemy and contradiction all in one.

A feral grin of anticipation marked her face. At last, a fight with someone outside her kindred worth noting. She whirled in rapid motion, the Rings of Azar sparking into glowing flame and giving the impression of streaking fire arcing in a terrible swift fashion trampling out the vintages of divine wrath, and the collision of forces erupted in a sonic and psychic and mystical eruption of power that made the very heavens tremble…..


	19. Unity:

**EARTH-SEVEN:**

"None of Earth or Heaven or Hell's Fane, may war against I who possess Etrigan's name!"

The incarnation of the God on the Gilded Throne stood impassively, warhammer in one hand, a massive jagged-edged shield on the other arm, a leering shark-grin the only sign of how much she relish the battle.

**_The Man of Steel and the grandson of Trigon the Terrible merged together. I always welcome chances to war against Angra Mainyu, master of Hell's Tetrarchy._ **

Superman launched himself at her with Kryptonian speed augmented by the daemonic, but as he hurled a blow at her she dodged it calmly and then with what seemed to him deliberately glacial slowness slammed a hammer into him that hurled him through Metropolis and across the ocean, ending with a tremendous impact that cratered the Pyrenees.

She froze for a moment. Bright golden angelic light was forming and an eyebrow rose even as omniscience easily answered the question.

Six wings of crackling golden light, armor of opulent gilded nature covered in lions and corvids. Eyes of terrible sunlight, runes of silver and onyx visible across the entity.

_Thou shalt not wage war against the realm of those who have merged the planes beyond and this world._

**Now this is fascinating** , she purred.

The great hammer suspended in mid-swing, she looked at the glowing being with eyes of fire and then hurled the hammer physically, the entity casually catching it in her gauntlets, only dragging a set of grooves in the ground, dropping it.

**Again you dog me, carrion-crow.**

_I am Raven, daughter of Lucifer Morningstar, archangel of the hosts of the Silver City._

_You shall atone for your crimes, abomination, and you shall burn._

The entity smiled and then fire fell from Heaven in lances of brilliant kaleidoscopic light. The monster raised her gauntlets with a vast leer across her face, awaiting the impacts. Indeed they lanced within, striking with terrible power and the entity who usually felt no pain felt sharp pain indeed, but the moment passed.

The entity was on her knees, and the golden glowing angel saw the daemon arrive and gazed at him with a gaze of fire and power, the sword in her left had igniting with a terrible arcing fire that slowed Etrigan the Superman.

From the smoking rent frame of the monster came a sound neither anticipated. Laughter, booming and triumphant, tinged with bloody red slaughter. A gauntlet moved from the face it obscured and the face was no longer recognizably flesh, instead the very material fabric of existence itself, wheeling stars and galaxies, dying and being reborn. A chill fell, dousing the blade and riming the landscape with frost and snow, as the other massively overbuilt gauntlet collided with the ground in a knuckle-walking pattern, the entity raising herself to her feet with a deliberately monstrous, slow fashion.

For a moment they beheld a gigantic creature of dark green flesh and ceratopsid appearance, with two heads and bright sun-like golden eyes horribly reminiscent of the angel's own, then a gigantic armored thing with a wolf's head atop an ocean of blood and an ever-rising throne of skulls. Then beyond both a many-angled thing that was not within spaces but between them whose corrupting power devoured existence wherever it went, ethereal, beautiful, ancient, but unfathomably corrupt.

And they looked and they beheld a beast rising from the sand, whose tongue was the silver one of a serpent and whose affability was that of a lamb, flesh torn to reveal the very void of existence itself, a mutilated hand more the rawness of reality itself given tortured form holding the warhammer and hurling it to the ground.

From the beast spoke peals of thunder and with the impact of the hammer, a brilliant flash of fire and rain of blood and smoke rose high to Heaven and obscured the very nature of existence itself. The cracks reverberated through the planet, striking once more at the same tilt that the Azar sought in the others. The entity smiled, her victory already won, and then turned to face Etrigan the Superman and the Angel of Ruin as she spoke in a voice of thousandfold blasphemies:

**_You look upon your master and your ruler. Dread me, run from me, you shall not be allowed to die or to fade into dust or nothingness. I am your every dream gone dreadfully, horribly wrong._ **

More mad laughter followed and she clenched her fist and vanished into a portal that opened with a yawning scream.

**WATCHTOWER TRAINING ROOM:**

"Amazo?"

The Worldbreaker cocked her head, smiling with a savage leer worthy of a shark.

"You….want to fight Amazo. In a room that can shield us from him?"

The entity folded her arms across her chest.

**It is not that unreasonable a request, Kryptonian.**

Superman frowned.

"You must know what the thing can do?"

**This is to prove a point about me, and correspondingly about the thing we're facing. This is going to be a crisis of infinite Earths, there is no solution to this that can be won by brute force alone. Try to face the New Ones with this kind of power, and we will always triumph. Whatever you possess will not avail you.**

Superman took a deep breath, then shrugged.

"Very well. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Walking aside, he let the seemingly featureless Amazo step up to her.

The monster smiled, calmly, her nine suns boring into Amazo.

The robot sought once more to fulfill his programming. His gears began to grind and his body to smoke, and the Worldbreaker calmly strode toward him, slapping him into the wall with a backhand, tearing him clean through the containment cell.

**Cease.**

With one word the robot fell unconscious, great rifts torn that crackled with eldritch lightning that created a low whispering howl. The League froze in horror.

**I did warn you, for a reason. Power is not your ally here.**

The entity smiled.

**There are other ways, however.**

And with that her gaze turned to the still-recuperating Raven, whose monstrous scar was hidden under a baggy sweater, who looked to her with shock.

"W-what are you looking at me for?"

**FOUR FREEDOMS PLAZA:**

Hank Henshaw found himself on his knees in front of an image of the very thing that had altered them. With him were frozen his wife, Janet, and their friends, one stunned in shock, the other amazed even his monstrously altered body could become what it was.

**_I made you four for a simple task, and you have yet to fulfill it._ **

The titan was twenty-five feet tall, with those strangely oversized boots and ring-adorned gauntlets, raising her right one meditatively, in a deceptively calm fashion. Her hand was flat, and they saw only her fingers in profile for a moment, somehow seeing in spite of her flesh being immensely more tangible and invulnerable than anything could logically have been all of the rings on that gauntlet.

Turning the back of her hand to them, the entity smiled.

**_You never had a choice from when I altered you._ **

The gauntlet slowly, agonizingly closed. The rings began to glow and the team screamed in pain and shock as the power of the monster filled them, warping them to Metropolis where they were to begin the rampage that would distract Superman and his ilk on her fulcrum-world.

EARTH-9:

It was here that the monstrous Azar finally got what she'd been waiting for since a confrontation with the Archangel still falling from Heaven toward the fulcrum-world. As her manifestation formed above the Earth of that world, a great fleet of the Green Lanterns arrived boosted by the Manhunters and behind them the gigantic abyssal shadow of a great ship. A Monitor Destroyer.

The twenty-five foot monstrosity, still formed partially of the material structure of other worlds briefly wavered, seeming to ripple.

On the Gilded Throne the core-entity opened her eyes from the non-sleep she remained in, controlling her empire.

**Another real fight** , she mused.

With that she stepped from the Throne and warped into replacing her avatar.

The change was a minor one, only one the Monitors within the Destroyer had the context to notice and it made them steeply uneasy indeed, even when backed up by around ten thousand of the Green Lantern Corps and an equal number of the inhuman Manhunter drones. The Azar's gauntlets and boots were now normal-sized, relative to the twenty-five foot monstrosity's body, the gauntlets were ringless. The Destroyers seldom moved save in the most grievous of circumstances, and they materialized out of the shadow-spaces when the God on the Gilded Throne opened her eyes over the Earth and hovered there, arms across her chest.

The Azar smiled.

After so many years of the heretical schism-sect giving rise to the notion of pacifism (not that being absorbed within her wasn't a kind of peace in its own right), it was time for the true abomination, master of Azarath-in-Truth to make her presence known.

It began when she unfolded her arms, drew in her lungs, impossibly, in the airless soundless void. Light began to glow in her throat and the Lanterns immediately opened fire with a massive barrage of constructs, beams, and dreadful power without hesitation or limit. The jaws of the God on the Gilded Throne parted unnaturally wide, like a snake's, and then the monster hurled her head forward and a massive clinging light-like force of brilliant red with a charnel-house odor hurled outward, tearing aside the constructs, withering them with a heat that pierced as with a deadly cold.

The Manhunters swarmed her, firing equal blasts of green, and the Azar smiled. Her armor briefly shifted and the charnel-house odor intensified, and for a moment the dark green armor became bright brass and a wave of malice oozed out. The Manhunters froze and the first whispers of something yet to be began to be heard.

A single word:

**Blood.**

Hesitations and yet enhanced speed, odd visceral elements, organic movements in the metal.

**Blood.**

Now faster movements, swifter than eyes could see, the first stirrings of something already ancient swift in the sowing and in the harvest.

**Blood for the.**

They began to turn upon each other as the Azar watched in delight, and upon the Lanterns who proved able to take them down, but found their efforts eased by the frenetic incoherence of the attacks they faced.

**Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne!**

This last chant repeated eight times, the brass armor becoming octagonal in design and the Azar smiling before resuming her ordinary appearance and moving with a swift grace that belied her monstrous size. And as she swam through them, savoring the feeling and the one-sidedness of the massacre, she caught a glimpse of a figure that froze her.

Bone-white skin, dark hair. Eyes that were either dark stygian pools of night or bright burning suns horribly familiar.

Holding aloft two Lanterns by their arms, preparing to hurl them against each other with force sufficient to kill them she saw this woman, if woman she was, flash her a kindly understanding smile and her gaze narrowed.

She was deathless, all her kind were.

How could she see Death if Death this was?

The Lanterns collided and the moment passed and the massacre proceeded apace, the Manhunters soon enough dispatched and a thousand of the Lanterns with them. At last the Monitor ship began to move, and the Azar smiled, covered in blood of a thousand colors, flexing her fingers in her gauntlets and proceeded to rocket toward it, delighting in the revel of the fight.

Calmly the Monitors prepared to fire with weapons of immense and dreadful power, believing that with this this challenge, terrifying as it was, would be dispelled and their function fulfilled.

Only one of them noticed the presence of a young Monitor in black jeans and a black tank-top with an ankh and a kindly smile and had a very odd premonition about just what kind of confrontation was imminent.

A fanged glowing-eyed smile, a daemonic peal of soundless laughter, acceleration into a streak of frozen blood and fire. Then the thunderous impact of the ship torn apart, the entity moving like a blur, tearing asunder the uncomprehending Monitors before they could muster an attack. A gamble, one based on the sheer unrelenting impact of speed and shock to derange even the mightiest, to forestall whatever greater attack would be there.

Each Monitor shredded by the speed and force heard the sound of beating wings and saw a kindly smile and said words to one who was invisible, and they saw her and it was very good. The monster burst through the ship in triumphant laughter, and then the immense destructive powers produced a boom that gutted the force of Lanterns, frozen in petrified confusion, shock, and awe, none of which lasted long as the monstrous titan careened through them.

Hovering as the last Lantern burst in a shower of gore and guts, the God on the Gilded Throne laviciously licked the blood off her gauntlet, savoring the slightly minty taste of the alien's veins, then a flash of bright light cleansed off the blood. She had already succeeded, she'd taken on the greatest foes the multiverse had to offer. Now for the next world.

Sickly green light surrounded her and she was gone.

**EARTH-10, the Wildstorm Universe:**

This Earth, of all Earths, was used to superhuman nightmares, and to monstrously powerful metas doing strange things. But even it was taken aback when the stars changed and the Dawnless day came. The Authority on their Carrier base were immediately alerted, as was Mr. Majestic. So too the immensely powerful John Snow and his wealthy group Planetary. Both Planetary and Mr. Majestic converged on the Carrier as the stars remained changed and the Earth careened with the screams of nightmare.

Of the various superhumans in this universe, only Snow and the Doctor understood what was coming for them, though even they remained immune to the details. Jeroen had a haunted shellshocked face, and Snow, uniquely, was truly frightened. It was when the stars vanished and a bright sun ignited over the Earth that the teams finally understood they faced a foe that was more and less than what the manifestation encircling the world would indicate. The sun vanished and a figure infinitesimally smaller than the planet began her descent.

Angelica Spica nodded at an invisible nod from Jack Hawksmoor and opened fire on the thing, striking it with weaponry derived from the Monitors. The blasts rocked her, and she fell from the sky headlong wreathed in flames. In silence the heroes of this world followed. This would be no different than any other pursuit of an entity they had managed, and like so many other beasts that sought to threaten their world this one would be put down. Hard.

Only Jeroen and Snow noticed that the fall changed directions as though the monster was unfazed, deliberately angling to the Himlayan range.


	20. Undying Fire on the Mountain Heights:

**Earth-10, the Himalayas:**

The monster landed on her feet calmly, and activated her next portion of her plan, laying the cuckoo's egg within the heart of this particular Earth. Her sight and hearing detected the approaches of Apollo, Mr. Majestic, and the Engineer, and the God on the Gilded Throne calmly turned, her armor unsinged and her eyes beginning to glow. Smiling, she formed the half-mask covering her lower jaw as part of her combat armor and formed an avatar to do the final touches, the avatar's larger gauntlets and boots gleaming with the raw material of reality warped to form her and give her flesh, blood. The immaterial armor.

Hurling herself headlong with calmness belying the tension within iron musculature and skin, the monster took eye blasts from Apollo and Mr. Majestic to the face with tranquility, simply forming a terrible smile and the Warhammer from midair, doing so instantaneously. The Engineer launched nano-tech combat tendrils that snared the hand with the hammer and the other one, seeking to control the monster and slow her approach. With a smile the Azar twisted one hand and shattered the nano-tech as it froze, rimmed with the frost of her presence, the other seeing the Warhammer move on its own and dissolve them with a swift blow too fast for even the superhumans to detect.

Apollo and Mr. Majestic collided with her in an impact that echoed with a thunderclap across the skies, visible sound vibrations forming a shockwave only the Engineer could have tolerated, and the Azar decided to amuse herself by letting them push her to the west of Everest, their speed carrying them all the way to K2, where the impact cratered the mountain. The monster laughed coldly and cruelly, even as the Carrier appeared instantaneously and the rest of the Authority and Planetary descended to face her.

Elijah Snow was in his element in the fullest and sought to bind the creature's arms and legs in snow and frost so unrelentingly powerful that she could not escape. The entity savored the irony that the first stirrings of what she would become brought manifestations of cold with it, but in truth she was Azar. The undying flame. That heat began to blaze out of her, igniting the lines between her armor plating in frameworks of light, her eyes, ears, nose, mouth all sharing that same dreadful glow.

Snow's ice and frost dissolved into steam, as did much of the waters around them, the sudden thermal shock bringing down Swift immediately, the Engineer rescuing her. Nodding to the Drummer, the two formed a massive thunderbolt the Azar deflected with a rapidly-summoned shield, the bolt careening outward and cratering part of the landscape of nearby Xinjiang. More thunderbolts followed but the sheer shimmering heat produced by the blazing fires the Azar let shine with full magnificence skewed their targeting.

Unaffected by the flame and even empowered by radiation that was in truth merely the up close and personal impact of sunlike radiation, Apollo hurled himself at her. Enhanced to many times his usual strength the tackle actually knocked the God on the Gilded Throne forward, the twenty-five foot creature slamming into the mountain, as she snarled in utter distaste. Apollo rained a set of blows on her back and the entity then smiled and moved at a blinding speed that was impossibly graceful and fluid for something of her size, her right fist colliding into Apollo and hurling him upward. The power of a burning star unleashed continued to scald the mountain, rendering her too bright to see and permitting her to dance around the attacks of Ambrose Chase and Mr. Majestic, quite literally, and enabling her to move with a blinding swiftness toward Elijah Snow, whose powers were overwhelmed by the task facing them.

He knew that cold manipulation required manipulation of heat, but there was no contest between even the powers of an old, crotchety, wise Century Baby and the literal glowing power of a star in proximity, as that power overwhelmed his, footsteps of molten rock forming the pattern of the entity that was otherwise imperceptible to him and to everyone else. His eyes were boiling tissue and steam rising from his face, his willpower all that kept him alive as the great Azar approach him and poked him lightly with a finger, igniting him and throwing him from the mountain, a blazing torch marking his fall.

She smiled behind her mask as Apollo returned, hurling into her at an awe-inspiring speed. The impact shoved her into the mountain, his blows growing in strength with proximity to her. The rocks around them continued to melt and the sheer heat proved a deterrence to all save Ambrose Chase, the Engineer, and due to his sheer unrelenting power, the Doctor. Jakita Wagner was on the Carrier, suffering major third degree burns over a significant portion of her body, as was the Midnighter. Knowledge of that only intensified the hammerblows Apollo was giving, the Azar impressed at the raw strength.

When she grew bored of the exercise she caught his fist in one of hers, then drew back her left arm and smashed him back up into the sky, forming a massive glowing ball of plasma around her as she hurled herself at the duo of the Engineer and the Drummer. The massive boost given to her powers by their teamwork stuttered and died when the sheer convection heat quite literally melted the Drummer, though the Engineer's nanotech held up just fine. Forming a set of tendrils, she launched them at the Azar's eyes, but the sheer heat that accelerated in defiance even of the tenuous laws of physics in superhero universes dissolved them into molten rains of fire. The sphere moved faster than she could react and a blow like being kicked by a sun-roid raging Apollo in the crotch slammed into her gut, hurling her into another mountain at hypersonic speed.

The Azar then wheeled around, launching herself at Mr. Majestic. He was endurable as was Apollo, though he was not superpowered by the Sun. Indeed her choking out oxygen in the air around her (for a being only partially rooted in the material realm did not breathe as ordinary beings did) caused him some difficulties, because even a being of his tier still needed air to breathe.

The coming of Apollo brought him deliverance as the ever-more powerful hero careened into the Azar with a thunderous boom that created yet another shockwave that unleashed multiple avalanches in its wake and created landslides, carrying her headlong with him into K2, which received a second and much more powerful crater. Moving at the speed of thought due to being exposed to a perpetual battery, Apollo's blows began to match the Azar's own for speed and the sadistic smile on his face made it clear that he enjoyed this.

The God on the Gilded Throne was deeply impressed but had other priorities. The cuckoo's egg was nearly complete and as she threw Apollo off with a sudden boneless move, she was struck by Ambrose Chase, who sought to crush her and her armor in reality-distortion fields. They were strong enough he could bear the Sun-tier heat around her with minimal difficulty. Smiling with genuine pleasure it was another boneless maneuver of hers that reached out to smash into Chase, cracking the field that protected him. In a matter of seconds he dissolved into ash exposed to the immense heat around her, and as she smiled in triumph, Apollo landed on her with both feet, quite literally, the impact cratering K-2 yet another time.

This time his blows matched her for speed, and the very core of a 1,239-year old physical multiversal virus felt genuine pain for the first time since she was a child. The impact of the blows was awesome, K-2 visibly losing height and falling with them, blows on par with the mightiest of the mighty. First her nose bled, then her mouth as she spat out teeth, then the blows began to crack her armor.

Deciphering that sunlight powered Apollo, the Azar decided to ignite things to the next level, figuring the overcharge would drive him off. All it did was make him still stronger to a point that it began to feel like the few times she'd genuinely pissed the Shadow-woman off to a point that the other, fledgling godling had left her bleeding and broken. She was horrified when Apollo's blows became faster than she could see and the mountain crumbled, becoming a field of broken rubble, the impacts cratering the ground around it, the Karakorum range trembling and losing altitude by the second.

No longer playing around with the mortals, the Azar snarled, catching one of his blows in her right gauntlet, briefly wincing with the pain and exulting in it, then the living starlight turned off, the Azar not even smoking from the heat, her armor unaffected. Channeling into herself the immensity of her own existence, the Azar caught his other blow, headbutting the super-charged Apollo hard enough to create shockwaves felt on the Richter scale and global waves that included multiple tsunamis. Five more such headbutts, then kicking him into a nearby rubble field that once had been a mountain, rocks flying at such speed it gave an impression of Paleolithic shrapnel.

Walking calmly, the Azar formed the Warhammer and proceeded to hurl it into Apollo with more such Richter impacts, and felt the power of the shaman hurling a bolt of altered physics at her back. Turning from the stunned Apollo, she smiled and froze his attack and calmly dropped it like jelly, her smile hidden behind her armor.

_**You seek to contend against a mistress of the multiverse with conjurations?** _

_**That's not power, maggot.** _

_**This is.** _

In her right hand she formed a small portion of her existing power, a glowing orb that hurt Jeroen's eyes to see it, then with a dismissive gesture hurled it at him. Relying on the full extent of his powers to preserve him, Jeroen's imagination-derived strength barely sufficed to the task. It was why the Carrier found him on Easter Island, his entire body bruised, unconscious, with every bone in his arms, legs, and his lower jaw fractured.

The task done, the God on the Gilded Throne laughed and returned to her throne, triumphant and angered at Apollo, who had personally incurred her wrath. She dispatched her Avatar to the next Earth, Earth-11.

**EARTH-11:**

This Earth had believed itself to have only one superman, though in truth it did have more. Dr. Manhattan had opened the floodgates after all. But…it had so few that the sudden darkening of the skies and ensuing wave of nightmares only led it to wonder if Ozymandias's scheme hadn't been his after all and if the atrocity in New York was to repeat itself.

The crackling light vanished and the monster descended from the sky and laid the cuckoo's egg in the Himalaya's with minimal difficulties, the tangled network of political jurisdictions needing to be overcome to deploy conventional military power against her taking longer to do that than the process did. A simple task and an unpleasant one for denying her her fight.

**EARTH-12:**

The skies changing here, however, did not work quite the same way.

The powerful Lord Superman, who'd become master of the world following the murder of his mother by the Joker immediately ordered the Regime to target the entity with the powerful weapons blending the most deadly weapons of Krypton and the various powers of the Regime. The entity was struck with multiple dead-on impacts but it neither stopped her descent nor slowed it down.

Superman, Raven, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, as well as Hal Jordan and Sinestro immediately converged on Mount Everest where the Azar prepared to activate the cuckoo and turned, wheeling with the delight of the battle to come.


	21. Signs in the Heavens:

**EARTH 12:**

The Azar descended calmly, ignoring the attacks, sorcerous and extraterrestrial in origin that smashed against her frame calmly, eyes boring upward as she activated the cuckoo with a clench of her right fist. Smiling with that monstrous serrated shark-grin, she hovered in mid-air, and only then did it fully dawn on the Regime that for all the immense power lavished on the attack on the Azar the entity was surprisingly unharmed.

They were uncertain as to the precise nature of the being they faced. Clad in dark green armor that seemed to maneuver and move in impossible angles, eyes glowing with the seemingly standard appearance of eye-beams, the size of Titano the Super-Ape, the Azar leered and spoke:

**Well, if you're going to fight, fight.**

Metal began to flow and warp out of thin air, the left arm shielded by a vast green shield with jagged spikes in front of it, the right wielding a massive Warhammer much longer than a man was tall, a hammer infused with an unnatural glow that arced and spiked and ripped into the vision of those who looked upon it and beheld it.

As Superman and Captain Marvel moved first, the entity turned to the constructs that Hal Jordan and Sinestro made, eyes glowing. A blinding flash of light later the constructs crumbled and then the Azar was in motion, slamming the hammer into Captain Marvel with sufficient speed to hurl him headlong to the ground, shrugging off the heat vision of Superman that struck her arm without visible effect, maneuvering so that the energy struck the shield and rippled, then blurring sufficiently fast that Superman was unable to fully counter her.

The energy of the Speed Force became visible and with that the Azar simply spoke a single word in Unspeech that caused the Flash to become visible and stumble and fall, convulsing with blood oozing from nose and eyes and mouth and further down, leering as she then maneuvered with that same boneless grace to strike a stunned Superman with the haft of the Warhammer. As she maneuvered, Raven struck her with bolts of demonic power, the bolts absorbed into the shield that moved effortlessly. Frustrated, Raven's eyes went from two to four and she unleashed a towering bolt summoning the full power of her father, the power she'd inherited, that had become hers.

This one struck home cleanly, a blow from a being with equivalent power. Searing through the shield, it sliced into the Azar's cheek, tearing the monster's flesh open to the bone.

The Azar whirled around in a boneless swiftness, lunging toward Raven, who empowered by the energies she'd absorbed, that she'd become began to tap into the truer facets of the demon Trigon, the Angra Mainyu, the fixture across time and space varying only in the nature of his manifestation. Blows that were tortured and twisted skeins of reality and howling souls formed into rays of what seemed like light but was neither it nor the Unlight that the Azar manipulated by her presence slammed into the monster, fracturing armor plating.

The voice of Angra Mainyu spoke from Raven's jaws.

**I was not able to break through in the Temple, Azar. You cast back to me a tiny sliver of my essence that did not want to return. Here you face no such sliver, you face the fullness of reality embodied in my daughter. My legacy and my continuation.**

The demon Trigon smiled with a terrible savage grin and as the blasts continued to lance into the Azar, blood spurted out for the first time, neither bright red nor iridescent but more like a molten plasma that burned what it came into contact with. The howl of pain was genuine and then the monster transformed, becoming not the familiar avatar-face that Angra Mainyu had seen countless times before but a gigantic creature of many angles and impossible looping arcs and curves, starlight and the material fabric of reality hewn into what could loosely be called a body.

Gone were hammer and shield, instead there was Presence and the entity maneuvered forward, slamming a fist into Raven that hurled her downward, the roaring Angra Mainyu righting himself and striking back equally, as Superman and Captain Marvel, fully recovered, fired heat vision and the lighting of the wizard Shazam in volleys aided by the light of the Sinestro Corps rings, and by Wonder Woman's God-Sword.

From twenty five feet, the monster had grown to closer to fifty meters tall, anchored into the ground on what were analogous to legs and with feet that seemed to oscillate between dinosaurian claws that anchored down into the ground and had edges that leaned upward and the tortured fabric of a multiverse hewn into the image of a monster. The creature's jaws were open and the sounds that echoed were in between speech and howls and the very Unspeech of a being that embodied the levels beyond, between the spaces known as opposed to within them. The things akin to arms moved with speed far beyond that possible for a being that size, swatting at Superman and Captain Marvel, each of whom grabbed one of the fingers on one hand, anchoring themselves in the air as Raven, remaining deliberately smaller and seemingly invisible next to the titanic force unleashed blows that rippled across its form, even as the entity finally looked upward while taking her right as she pointed above with her first two fingers.

The monstrous colossal mouth broke into a strange leer akin to that of her smaller form and horrid for the resemblance as bolts of a terrible power arced down like fire from Heaven, each of the impacts disabling the superheroes, inflicting near-fatal injuries on the fallen Lanterns saved by the immense power of the Rings that gave them their abilities, stunning Superman and Captain Marvel without visible injury, smashing into Wonder Woman with such monstrous force that parts of her legs transformed into clay that melted, leaving the rest of her sagging and unconscious.

Against Raven the blows struck and she howled in genuine pain, frustrated again at the seeming stalemate even as the monstrous thing grasped her in one of its hands, shrugging off the power that sought to be wielded against her and asserted the will of the God on the Gilded Throne. Angra Mainyu's power and concentration were broken and the entity smiled, the cuckoo activated, and formed a portal of equivalent size, stepping into the next world, pausing only to obliterate the entire set of orbital engines that had ceaselessly bombarded her while effortlessly avoiding even slight collateral damage to the Kryptonian's allies.

To her annoyance, the next five Earths were claimed by the cuckoos before the equivalents of the League or the Titans could be rallied, even when in the first two she'd arrived in the form of her towering presence, the entity too far gone in her power to comprehend that it was the psychic backlash of entering at full blast that had kept the heroes busy containing the effects, something they were only partially successful therein.

**METROPOLIS:**

"It's nice of your cousin to have us here, Supergirl." Robin's voice was confident and he smiled at Kara, as the Titans relaxed, eating pizza near Bibbo's.

"Clark wanted us to experience what it was like to patrol somewhere else."

Robin nodded.

"Jump City's been kind of quiet anyway between you and this truce thing that's going on."

Nodding, it was then that Supergirl's senses detected the booming arrival of the Four, and with a quick set of hand motions the Titans sprang into immediate alert.

"What the hell?"

Cyborg's voice was plaintive as he saw the streak of fire that was the being that would come to be known as X-Ray, the continued booms of the impacts of the creature known as The Thing, though only Supergirl could hear the maneuvers of the invisible woman. She could hear her, but her vision and her horror were focused on the one leading this group of four, the being that bore the face of her cousin and had once been the scientist Hank Henshaw.

A soft awed "Oh Rao" from her followed the arrival and landing of Henshaw on the roof, his human and mechanical eyes glowing, the mechanical right eye less bright than the Kryptonian left one.

A fractured voice somewhere between alien and machine said:

**All are one in the Azar.**

With that Robin shouted: "Titans Go!"

Beast Boy transformed into a Pterosaur, seeking to divert X-Ray, while Starfire and Cyborg found themselves facing the monstrous Thing, who grinned at them.

Cyborg said "Aw that boy ain't right" before firing his sonic blasts as Starfire levitated into the sky, eyes glowing, and hurled Starbolts.

Robin for his part used smoke bombs to reveal the presence of the invisible woman, whose body proved able to summon shields that deflected his birdarang. Gulping, Robin knew this wasn't going to be a pretty picture.

Kara, for her part, flew up into the sky, eyes glowing as she faced Henshaw.

"I don't care what that thing did to you, you may look like a Cyborg-Superman but you are still Hank Henshaw."

**All are one in the Azar, embrace the gift of everlasting life and the Unity across the worlds. She will gather the 52 realities and their offspring and remake them. Infinity shall become unity, and the worlds that we have known shall be free of misery, of death, of pain, of strife. No more Kryptons.**

Supergirl snarled, the parody of her cousin broke down with Henshaw's voice filtered in the mechanical aspect, and that loathsome aspect gave her extra boosts as she slammed into him, hurling the Cyborg back with a tremendous boom. Henshaw's eyes were wide, both the mechanical and the human, and then realizing he was not only alive but that had just felt like a hard hit and not anything beyond that, the two faces smiled an equally loathsome smile and he began to retaliate by aiming a blow with his Kryptonian modified hand to Supergirl's face and seeking to cut with the metal of his right hand across her belly.

He was disappointed the disembowelment failed, even as Beast Boy gave X-Ray a nifty chase, the new metahuman villain lacking the experience to use his powers, and familiarity with his limits. As Beast Boy shifted to forms adapted to the highest edges life could fly, X-Ray began to feel the chill of the sky, and it finally disrupted his concentration.

Groaning he fell and Beast Boy transformed into an Azdarchid, the entity catching the man with Beast Boy carefully shapeshifting modified strength that let it bear a human's weight and bring him down safely. Briefly reverting to his default state, Garfield Logan grinned. One down. Then he saw the Thing hurling Cyborg back with a bestial growl as more green light exploded against it and he surged back into combat.

Unknowingly his transformed gorilla-state collided with the invisible woman, whose befuddlement at a green gorilla transformed her into her otherwise normal state, a factor solved by a gorilla-punch. Robin, exhausted and panting with cuts on his body, and tears in his uniform, looked to Beast Boy with a nod of respect.

As the Cyborg and Supergirl continued to clash in the skies above Metropolis with thunderclap blows, another arcing boom followed as Superman, all too aware of what was going on in Metropolis arrived, joining Supergirl, who while unfrazzled and grateful that Henshaw had no ability to grasp the fullness of his powers, found the combination of fighting him and keeping him from targeting civilians or buildings a task that at present was beyond her experience.

With Superman's aid, the two progressively wore down Henshaw's endurance in a carefully targeted method of attrition that to the humans and even the metahumans minus Cyborg's mechanical eye was beyond vision in speed. Henshaw found himself aware that his forms could tire, especially when he lacked the ability to keep his energy hopping, and then a Speed Force blur caught his eye only for Supergirl and Superman to be away in a blur that he couldn't pace.

Green light hit him and then he realized how high up he actually was, and the flip side of having a Kryptonian's powers. That meant he got their weaknesses, too. As he fell down, Aquaman leapt upward, catching his form.

**CITADEL OF THE TEMPLE AZARATH, THE GILDED THRONE:**

Annoyed, the God on the Gilded Throne saw that her initial concept had not paid off. The so-called Teen Titans, a group that had stood up against her as well as the League had, on the central world to her schemes had managed to repel her Four who'd immediately leapt into an attack without experience in such combat or ability to wield what they had. If they would not maneuver, there were others who could, and would.

The God on the Gilded Throne formed another avatar in that world's skies, which reflected the familiar process of her arrival, then sent the avatar streaking into the oceanic depths. Attacking a single city on a world full of supers boosted by the unholy alliance her presence had brought into beings was, in the ever-keen gaze of hindsight, a foolish strategy done foolishly.

Why go for a city when at a stroke there was one who could give her the full power of the Seven Seas and plunge an entire planet into a superhuman war, a task that even the Unholy Alliance would struggle to contain? The God on the Gilded Throne smiled, then her attention focused on the Trojan appearance of another avatar in a new universe that had until the use of the 'successful' incantation had no idea of the existence of the broader universe. The hunger that coursed through her would not be denied, nor the Unity she brought. Nor the end of death that followed her presence. A smile crossed her face as she likewise saw that in another part of all that was, an old and familiar foe had made her presence known.

**EARTH-17:**

The God on the Gilded Throne, the Great Azar had been a being of half-human descent and like all such beings of woman born. Her ancestor had been a Jewish woman, Julia Domina, an assimilated Latinophile Jew who'd been one among many persecuted by the decaying barbarian kingdom overthrown by the armies of Jibr-al-Tariq. That had been long ago, and in many if not most ways the God on the Gilded Throne seldom cared to remember or to acknowledge her heritage.

Then she arrived on the world that Overman and his League existed, the world run by the National Socialists, who'd slain her people, the children of Israel. The first Jew to exist on that world in decades openly, the Azar's lingering and stunted sense of humanity flared out, light surging across her armor.

Though she was born before the prayer had taken its fullest form, the entity was omniscient, and spoke in flawless Aramaic the Mourner's Kaddish:

_Yitgadal, v'yitkadash sh'ma Rabba…_

As the litany finished, the entity paused over the Himalayas. There was no reason beside her desire to fight for the thrill of fighting to leave certain types of worlds alive, and here the avatar faded to become the God on the Gilded Throne herself. Seldom did the entity take the genuine pleasure in her quest for the deathless world to savor the power of unrelenting fire and destruction that flowed through her veins.

Not here. Not on the very tiny smattering of worlds like this. The cuckoo formed and the entity then became for a moment in time the most human she had been, forming a colossal column of light that slammed into Earth-17 and obliterated that doomed universe and its entire subset of affiliate worlds as though they had never been.

Another Monitor ship was alerted by this sudden and casual act of destruction, but given the entity and the nature of the worlds destroyed, found it lacking in them to defend the premise that these worlds, at least, had deserved to survive. Several thousands of worlds, trillions of lives lost simply on the Earths and infinitely more beyond that.

The multiversal fixtures of Darkseid and his fellow New Gods winced in pain and pleasure alike, the casual annihilation of their abilities to access these worlds underscoring why these alliances were necessary. Darkseid and Highfather looked at each other. The blow also underscored a truth they understood and that the rest of these heroes and villains alike did not.

The Crisis of Infinite Earths had dawned, and if they did not plan successfully to counterbalance the kind of power that obliterated thousands of worlds in the infinite possibility, the low number reflecting the implausible circumstances required to achieve the initial aim, they would face a scenario where worlds would beg this fate rather than the terrible unity of Azarath.

**THE WATCHTOWER:**

Raven, her wounds continuing to slowly heal, watched more of the Miracleman mini-series. One of her favorite episodes TiVoed.

The narrator's voice, the cold and inhuman-sounding tone of Miracleman saying:

_They saw the smile on the face of the tiger_

The Black Adam-esque form of Kid Miracleman glowing with a terrible power, his eyes focusing on the camera.


	22. Deep Into That Darkness Peering:

**The Depths of the Atlantic:**

Orm the Ocean-Master was angry, hardly an atypical situation for the elder brother of Orin, the damnable wretched half-breed who so easily outmaneuvered a pure Atlantean of the blood. Yet even then, there was a sense of family, of love. Of duty. Orm could not readily or easily kill the rightful king of Atlantis, nor would he ever be able to do so. The frustration and hobbling of his options this meant periodically led him to decisions like this, to cross the immensity of the depths of the oceans, to burn it out in great swims.

It was during this that a terrible blinding flash of light had occurred near the vast trench where slept a great monster, and Orm, the protective martial instincts that marked his own resemblance to his own sibling, could not resist the impulse to follow it. Then the dissonance of that thought with his own kind stopped him and Orm sought to maneuver upward, only for him to see the great light maneuvering forward and upward, slowly, inexorably. With a hint of malice and contempt growing.

Orm started when...something...manifested in the stgyian depths of the ocean. Sickly green light that was impossibly bright shone through the depths, causing him a brief momentary blindness and disorientation, though the effects faded relatively quickly thanks to the blessings of Atlantean biology. His eyes focused and then he saw the giant with her arms crossed in front of her chest. Twenty-five feet tall, her hair fanning out from her face and cape seeming to move with an effect more like wind, something that awed him and made him cautious, reaching for his trident.

The giant looked at him, her cheeks flared out in a dish-like fashion recalling some of the fossils the surface dwellers said were ancient ancestors or relatives of the first humans, something he was unclear on and only startled into remembering by the way the eerie light that emanated from between the lines of the armor plating lit and reflected off her face, especially the partial armor concealing the mouth.

"What exactly are you? Surface dwellers are not welcome here."

A voice boomed that was not a voice in a conventional term, a thunderclap and a whisper, a soul-flaying slice of a psychic knife that tore into him in a way he was unprepared for even with experience of the colorfully costumed allies of his brother.

**I am not a surface dweller, son of Atlantis. I am the Undying Flame, a god to the gods, firstborn of all chaos. From me your Lords of Chaos derive power though they know it not.**

A flash of memory of the creature Klarion made him draw his trident and move but before he could make a single further motion the entity held the trident in her right gauntlet, which was not absurdly oversized for a reason he could not quite place. Her dish-like flared face bared teeth in a monstrous shark-like smile full of serrated fangs, the jaws seeming to extend outward and then to move to a more humanoid posture so rapidly he was uncertain what precisely he'd seen.

You cannot attack me, maggot. And you do not want to try.

**I have sent four entities to task those surface-dwellers you despise and I know even with the Kryptonian modifications on the cyborg he will not be able to match the task I have assigned to him for anywhere near the length of time.**

Her fanged smile widened.

**You, however, have command of vast armies with technology matching or even exceeding the Guardians of the Universe. You cannot, however, match your brother Orin in command of the Seven Seas, nor the Kryptonian, the Martian, and Orin together...**

She released the trident and moved back, smiling as she opened both gauntlets, the light playing out producing an eerie effect that chilled even the Ocean Master, himself uncertain.

**I can give you that power, for a price of my choosing, as I will it chosen. All you have to do to seal the bargain is to take my hand.**

For a moment Orm remembered a brief moment in time where he'd seen a very pale woman with dark eyes and the kindliest smile he'd seen who'd asked him to take her hand and then enabled him to be reborn after...after something that he could not remember happened.

The glowing gauntlet with the lighting extending between each of the grooves on the fingers and the thumb, and the rings glowing in different shades of green extended to him. He found himself uncertain and seeking to resist, and a slight eyebrow raise and a partially impressed face were followed by the most imperceptible of pulses. Orm's hand extended outward and clasped the gauntlet, ludicrously small in the hands of the twenty-five foot thing that gazed at him.

Then the fires entered him beneath the sea and light rose up to swallow him and Orm screamed in a terrifying howl that echoed across the depths of the Pacific. Deep within the deepest part of a trench, a monstrously ancient...thing...that had slept the sleep of ages broken only by other things like itself but hostile interlopers into its territory awoke in response to the scream and the pulsing green light.

Yellow eyes flashed open and the great creature's spines briefly flashed blue, as did its eyes. After twelve million years, Gojira had awoken, and the Ocean-Master had the first King to follow him in the better part of a decade.

In another part of the Pacific an atoll that was not an atoll flashed with light and two other eyes flashed. It too had felt the call and knew that terrible times were beginning.

**Earth-12:**

Rocked once by the arrival of the Great Azar and the awareness of the multiverse that fully dawned on it, this dimension was shattered twice more, the first time when space screamed with a terrible sound heard throughout the width and breadth of reality. Only in the realm of the great Seven, the Endless, even the one who'd abandoned his position and yet for all that was still Endless, was the sound heard and dismissed as more signs of the upheaval, the seven Endless aware that their presence would not be altered unless the monster that had planted these cuckoos succeeded. Even then there were their other forms in that other multiverse, however much they despised them.

Space screamed and bled and an angel fell to Earth, wings bright and brilliant and terrible. The sky flashed and shrieked in agony like a damned soul, though the Angel was unconscious from the effects of the terrible power that had awaited him, and humanity was frozen. Even though the arc was one that carried the angel into the Andes with a thunderous explosion producing an unlight not unlike that of a mushroom cloud, people awake or asleep saw it as though it were straight in front of them.

The impact drew immediately the presence of the Regime, this time armed to the teeth with weaponry more terrible than anything else at their disposal.

A few seconds later the planet was enveloped in another presence, something…familiar, moreso by far than the strange entity that had sought to conquer the planet and yet clearly kindred. A bright and terrible shining light drowned out the stars and visions were there of a being, somewhere between the old medieval military order-monk, the knight who took oaths before his god and went forth to deal battle and destruction and death, and the old ideals of the superhero before the destruction of a city led a living god to proclaim the doctrine of the Overman.

Clashes of a terrible war of a scale to defy imagination rippled, the lightning-infused smoke aweing people, and so too the strangely familiar and yet not so imagery of a towering giant of technorganic shape unleashing terrible blasts of destructive force from both his hands and yelling in delight.

The light consolidated into a singular being of the same height as her sibling, but bone-white in skin, with nine glowing golden eyes.

Zauriel had fallen too rapidly for the machines to register, the delay, even with the….erratic….effects produced by the grand psychic effects of the New Ones making their presence known permitted them to zero in on the descending Lightdancer, a being who had they known of her presence would have disturbed them for her mirror in form and presence to the Worldbreaker, the mirror only askew in that the Lightdancer had all the cruelty and destruction of the other but…..more complete, perhaps.

Terrible energies arced toward her and the monster simply froze in air, sighing.

**I don't have time for this.**

A slight snarl grasped her lips and the Black Smoke erupted from around her in a pair of columns that seared out, disintegrating the energies of Krypton and Oa as though they had never been, then the entity within a boneless dancer's skill resumed her downward arc. She could have taken her lover with her, but there was no point to that, not really. Not at present.

It would only exacerbate confusion.

A sonic boom followed over the Andes, the Regime sending its heaviest hitters. The Aquaman, the Superman, Shazam, Wonder Woman, and Raven. Each of them gathered at the sight of the awe-inspiring and beautiful being. Six were his wings, covered in eyes, and the glow was a bright gilded one as of flames and the spectre burned none of them, even Raven, who found herself startled at this and having to reappraise some of her expectations about what the transfer of power between herself and her father meant. And what her father actually was.

They heard another and then saw a towering entity, some thirty feet tall, descending clad in armor with a light blue cape. Instinct led Wonder Woman to lunge at the being with the Godkiller in full swing, only for the entity to move with a surprising degree of speed that she'd not expected in spite of the encounter with the other one, grasping her and hurling her upward into the sky, with a gritting of teeth and an:

I really don't have time for this right now.

Landing, the entity knelt beside the Angel.

Another giant, reflected the inhabitants of Earth-12.

**My sister's clearly been by here. This is her work.**

The tall entity resembled one of the Forbidden Seven, the servants of mortality, the concepts given flesh and form. She resembled her but swollen from a height that was that of a normal woman, anywhere from seventeen to forty and always ageless and kind to twenty-five feet. Instead of clothing that was soothing and prone to produce a dissonance in those who expected Death to be stern and cruel, this entity arguably resembled more what such people would expect.

A horribly familiar light blue cape, a loincloth of the same color. But the armor itself was unadorned with the symbolism or light, a dull grey slate color, that of a knight errant who needed no symbolism to broadcast power. And like a knight errant, saturated in menace and bloodshed.

It was not the Regime, nor the insurgency that interested the tall thing with the nine glowing sun-eyes, it was the fallen being who'd torn open a hole in space above them, and had landed in the midst of the Andes, cratering two entire mountains to leave a vast gaping pockmark on the surface of the Earth.

The Lightdancer's gaze was impassive, and when Superman lunged forward to try to take down this entity, he collided straight into a clenched fist that to his shock and horror and a degree of awe, left his nose broken and him spitting out a tooth.

**Depart from me, son of Jonathan Kent, I have no interest in fighting you. The fools in the central...nexus...of all this have a part of me as an ally they should beware more than the rest, for that part is my savagery unconstrained by the rest.**

The entity knelt by the fallen angel, whose wings still quivered with the impact, and whose body carried the massive fist-dents produced by a terrible gauntlet, and the indents within indents produced by the Rings of the Dread Azar.

**This one will matter greatly at the end of things. How like my foolish sister to seek continually to defy fate, only to create it.**

Even after witnessing Superman thrown back, this didn't deter Captain Marvel or Raven, who decided where brute force did not work, magic would.

The cry of SHAZAM! and the unleashing of the dreadful power of the demon Trigon followed, and the Lightdancer closed all nine of her eyes and sighed.

**I am not the Azar, mortals. You can wound her avatars and risk your own destruction. Nothing that exists in this world or in any other may pierce my flesh, nor draw my blood.**

With a swiftness and bonelessness akin to the Azar's but something that was hypnotic in a sense of awe rather than unrelenting pain and terror, the Lightdancer turned and stared calmly, crossing her hands across her chest. The energy collided into her and as it did, Raven paused suddenly to see all nine of those eyes open and a monstrous fanged smile that suddenly indicated an all too powerful family resemblance...

The light burned more brightly and more brightly still, covering the entity in the glow, and then when Shazam and Raven were finished with the spell it faded away, leaving a bored-looking Lightdancer gazing even as Wonder Woman, she knew, was hurling toward her with the pointy end of her sword aimed straight for her eyes.

**I don't have the time for this, not really, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy this. You of all people, daughter of Trigon, should know that blood lineage does not dictate fate, though perhaps you're the wrong one of you to give that particular reminder to. I can see in your memories you sought to hurt my sister, and insofar as she, savoring the fight more than intending to win did not appreciate your own abilities, you perhaps did.**

The Lightdancer smile.

**However…**

It was with a sudden blur that she grasped Diana by the wrist as Diana was within range to stab her with the sword and then moved faster than even the Kryptonians and the incarnation of the power and majesty of the demon Trigon could react, quite literally hurling Diana at Shazam, who anchored himself only to be barreled over with her by the sheer locomotive-worthy nature of the impact.

**We are bone of bone and flesh of flesh descendants of a warlord who never shrunk from the willful challenges of the foolish and the ignorant, even if perhaps a more moral man would have.**

She grinned.

**I'm the great warlord of a single side, and I know one great truth of such things. Morality does not win wars. Power does.**

More blurs and then the Aquaman was stunned by the impact of a gauntlet to his face, knocking him backward into unconsciousness, the impact of a gauntlet visible in the bone, while Diana and Shazam righted themselves even as Superman lunged for the Lightdancer, who effortlessly sidestepped the heat vision, smiling as she then grasped both of his hands in her right gauntlet, before drawing back a fist, and then smashing it into Superman's guts with sufficient force that Superman fell unconscious likewise, and then as Diana and Shazam moved further, the entity simply spoke the word:

**Sleep**

And they fell unconscious, unmoving.

That left Raven, empowered by the fullness of what was within her.

_**I am used to warring against your sister, Lightdancer. Not you.** _

The Lightdancer's gaze was impassive, her head deliberately cocked.

**Do not lie, Angra Mainyu.**

_**Not a lie. I wage wars against her. I have yet to avoid a massacre against you, which is why I try to avoid drawing your interest.** _

The Lightdancer smiled.

**And yet you have.**

With that Raven unleashed her eyebeams that the Lightdancer waded through, calmly. No formation of weaponry from midair even with the Lightdancer's invocation of the form of a knight, simply wading through power much like Clark himself would have done in the past before Clark Kent died in grief and the Overman was born in destruction and power and ruin.

The same terrible arcing power that had torn clean through the Azar followed in its train, grinding against the plates of her armor like the shrieks of the damned and the raw rumbling of tectonic plates. No impact, the Lightdancer's smile widening.

**It's never been an idle boast, Lord of Pandaemonium. Nothing has ever pierced my flesh, nor shall it ever. The price to contain the unstoppable force is to become the immovable object.**

The Lightdancer blurred again, grasping Raven in a necklift with her left hand, smiling as she then saw the demon Trigon's power blazing from her.

**This is why even though this should have been avoided, I chose not to. I will never resist a chance to humble Angra Mainyu of the Tetrarchy.**

The right gauntlet collided into her face with an impact that if it had been simply Raven, daughter of Trigon, would have decapitated her and seen the emergence then of the true thing behind the flesh, and from there things would have been different. As it was, with Trigon himself, the impact hurled her across the globe, landing with a cry of pain and shock straight into Nanda Parbat.

Now with that out of the way…..

She resumed kneeling by Zauriel, forming a portal and taking the unconscious angel with her in a blinding flash of light that left the ground around it seared.

**The Fortress of Eternity:**

Zauriel groaned. He was one of the high command of the heavenly host, one of its best individual fighters. And he felt like…

He felt his head. The impacts were gone, and healed. In spite of…

It was only then that he focused around him and gazed in shock. This place felt like the presence of the monster that had assailed him in a sense. Kindred power, certainly, in the sheer rawness and viscerality of it, the monstrous hammers that struck everything and turned everything into nails by sheer dynamism. But…..

It was then that he saw a being striding toward him in a simple silver robe, another being to her right. The one on the left was bone-white with glowing golden eyes and dark hair, the one on the right was technorganic with glowing eldritch energies, a red glowing eye, and was clearly once a man now ascended to become someone completely different.

_Why am I here?_

Zauriel's question was followed by him raising an eyebrow.

_Last time I encountered one of you, that one hurled me from Heaven and showed me a new power that's rising in existence itself in the process. If you're here to do the same, I did survive something nothing else save perhaps the Spectre would_ -

Amused laughter cut him short. And it was only then that he registered a key difference. The other one, the Azar, had been a psychic flaying knife even to him, a sense of vulnerability that offended his sense of righteousness and terrible purpose. A thing neither god nor demon, something unnatural and unholy had torn him from Heaven even when the Presence had not willed it and managed to reinforce that.

This? This was a visceral rawness of righteousness and cleansing, the terrible purpose of its own, akin to that of the various inquisitors and the Tophetim of the old days.

_You…you're like that thing that I encountered._

**Oh come now Zauriel** , the giant on the left said, crossing her arms around her chest, eyes glowing.

**You already knew that. You sensed the energetic similarities. We are indeed kindred, she and I. Both born of Jewish women of Sepharad, one at its dawn in one universe, one at its death in another. And both children of Turugamvirakil the Universal Emperor, one born to devour existence, the other to be its shield and its sword.**

She smiled for a moment, and he then started.

_So the stories were right. Cthulhu and his companions were not the last._

The Lightdancer shook her head.

**No, they are not.**

**And now I will tell you why you're here, and what it is that awaits you in the onslaught that seeks to drown your universe and so many others in fire and sword.**


	23. The Old Ones Were, the Old Ones Are, The Old Ones Shall Be:

_The Fortress of Eternity:_

The God of the Gilded Throne had been a massive supernova,  a balefire light that burned and withered as with heat and pierced as with wire and serrated edges. The Lightdancer was a solid density, a singularity in bright silver armor with a light blue cape and loincloth, and in her ebony hair, golden eyes, and kindly smile Zauriel, Archangel, perceived in horror a direct overlap with one of the seven Endless. A cold cryptic smile quirked at the lips of the Lightdancer as her eyes bored into his own. 

**You see correctly, Archangel. I am what you see, or more precisely, the Endless come in many facets. Most of them for the one you see the parallel with and fear are truly kindly and affable. But for some, Death is a kind thing, for some, it is a terrible and horrid thing. And for some it is the avalanche on the mountain, inexorable and unstoppable, the force that is the most terrifying because all are one in Death. And so things are what they are, not what some who are more foolish would wish them to be.**

**And it is that which concerns you. By now you know that a set of dimensions forgettable and forgotten where evil was rewarded have been not assimilated but utterly devoured, assimilated, obliterated. True-death and retroactively such as they had never been. I am a Jew of Sepharad, there are no tears for the murderers and slayers and children of decay. They were justly chosen as a symbol, for none shall mourn them nor seek to resurrect them. But......you have seen now something that you had never imagined. In another set of multiverses it would be a being called an Anti-Monitor that would draw you together, and you would be guaranteed triumph, and as such those of us From Beyond would have no business one way or the other.**

**Here, in this one, the entity known to you as Azar, the great Goddess of Azarath worshiped by her reincarnated priestess and her entire cult, has become manifest and hungers, devours, seeks to bind your worlds together.**

Zauriel spoke:

_What manner of being is this?_

The Lightdancer smiled.

**Like me she is a child of Kelzhandar, the children of the Unified Realm of the Deathless, wherein paradise dwells. Most of us absorb the virtues as well as the vices. She has only the vices and them magnified at that to astronomical proportions suiting a being of her power and of her ambition. She seeks to bind together each of the fifty-two prime worlds of the main multiverse, using an invocation of a twisted mirror of the Yggdrassil to bring together worlds, and wielding a Key to indirectly unite them into herself.**

_How can anything-_

With that the Lightdancer's right hand moved two fingers imperceptibly and her smile became very wide and cold and horribly reminiscent of the other entity's, and he saw. The entity he'd fought was but an avatar of something far more immense and terrifying, and something that to his appalled dread was only vaguely understandable. The very lowliest elements of reality and the very greatest in a terrible unity and synchronicity, and all of this held together by a giant on a throne suitable to scale, formed in the image and the likeness of a skull coated in gilding, with characters of a blasphemous alien language. Monks in avian robes intoned praise and to his further initial awe and then genuine anger there was a deliberate invocation and mockery of the very image and likeness of the Presence himself.

**That is what you oppose. What you fight is almost invariably an avatar, a construct the greater entity creates to interact with mortals. Were things differently she would be so mighty and beyond you that she would not deign to do these things in that fashion. She, however, is a sadist, an entity relishing in battle, and blood, fire and fury, and of all the worlds' endings. When she stalks among you it is not some genuine challenge but craving sensation that can never be satisfied, decay that leaves things frozen in endless stagnation and blood-revelry, magic and the sheer knowledge that all that is there knew it was at one point not a part of that entity but now is. Forever longing for death but unable to die. When she wants to, instead of her constructed avatars alone she can summon great armies with weaponry that are each as much her as the avatars.**

And with that he saw the Gem of Trigon howling and transformed from the daughter of Trigon or Pride of the Children of the Malebolgia to the entity of the Gem, and an ivory and golden spear thrown through her presence bound to Yggdrassil and as one infinite universes died instantaneously and were reborn, the children magnified and enhanced in power, and tormented by the knowledge that they were reborn ever young, incapable of knowing illness nor pain, forever praising a deity that had remade them....and forever subjected to that entity's sadistic whim when the thing on the throne deigned to notice an individual world and visited upon it her specialized torments.

_This cannot happen._

**No, it cannot.**

Then her hands moved with a blinding speed and grasped the side of his head.

**I shall give you what is necessary to forestall the fate that shall come upon you when the great battle dawns. If I intervene personally your multiverse might have four or two universes where it had fifty two if it is fortunate. If you do, however.....**

Zauriel screamed and then a blinding light overtook him.

**Skull Island:**

The King of the Island had spent time since their last confrontation in 1962 licking his wounds. He knew all too well the dreadful power of the King of the Monsters and had no desire to launch any kind of a renewed struggle with him. A providential freak of nature that had given him the power of the storm in his paws had been all that saved him then. He did not expect the Earth or the Sky to be so generous with their favors this time. When the Call came from the depths of the sea Kong had heard it, the rumbling echoing bellow of something primordial, strong enough to awaken the Monster King and to bind that terrifying will and its dreadful living fires of the gods nature to its service.

Rising from the rough-hewn equivalent to a throne he had forged with fists from a mountain and the bones of his parents as a tribute to the last of his kindred other than himself, Kong found a suitable element of the Soma juice that the natives of Skull Island retained the lost secret of manufacturing. If he was going to do this, he needed a fucking drink.

**Marianas Trench:**

Gojira swam upward, his golden eyes gazing with a dull element, the inner power of the Monster King struggling against this. The arrogance of these Atlantean Whelps. Bad enough they'd made their False Titans, the giant turtle, and the demon of the shrieking sound, but this? Orm's call continued to pull him and the creatures and lesser monsters of the deep parted before him in terror as his spines lit up with a blue light that was visible in the deep depths. An Atlantean vessel exploring to see if clues to the change that had grasped the Trench were potentially discoverable slammed into the creature's bulk in an eruption of glass and blood, Godzilla heedless of the impact as he stormed upward.

To his right another creature, the other False Titan, the one that had made him the foe of Atlantis that served as the Earthshaker's instrument for toppling it and letting its Gyaos creatures feast upon its ruins, it followed him. Godzilla ached to struggle against it, but the False Titan, the thing made in his image and his likeness continued to move forward with its dull blind eyes gazing upward in a mockery of sight. It too had heard the Call, and when the Ocean Master willed it that the great artificial Gods of yesteryear walked, so then would it be.

**The Watchtower:**

The Worldbreaker and Vincent Stone looked at each other with a mixture of amused contempt. They'd taken on Darkseid and Superman themselves in another sparring match, no restraints, and while Vincent had the first cracks in his metal in centuries, they had healed painlessly and swiftly. Superman was on his back with blood running from a broken nose, the light of the Sun leading to that repairing with a crunching that made others wince, while Darkseid was on a single knee, glowing red eyes burning like suns, and a cold smile on his lips.

_Best two out of three?_

The two nodded and by mutual consent they took breaks to relax. The Four had been dealt with and the world quiescent as the Alliance continued to spar and hone people's awareness of each other's quirks, making for all manner of unlikely team-ups, for while none mourned for Earth-X and its associated worlds, all knew that an equivalent FUBAR would drown their own worlds likewise and none wished that their follies would make their world perish.

**Earth-18:**

The Justice Riders looked with concern at the changed sky. Nighttime had fallen in the day, not just in the West but worldwide. The nocturnal animals were out and those who were dreaming worldwide were wracked with screams of nightmares. Something was coming. The stars, the strange stars, did not glow right. They glowed with a dull sterile look and a sickly brownish-green hue, and the Riders on their horses were deeply uneasy when the changed sky seemed to recede and a column of that light slammed down before them. The day had dawned again, seemingly, but as the light formed into a giant twenty-five feet tall with dark green armor and blue eyes that glowed with witch-light that seeped through the metal of her armor, even they, the mightiest men and women of the Earth knew fear and their horses reared in terror.

With a contemptuous snort the God of the Gilded Throne formed a warhammer and raised it out toward them with a mocking salute and before any of them grasped the swiftness of the motion the hammer impacted on the Earth with power sufficient to create an Earthquake that threw them all from their horses and broke the limbs of several of them.

**Pathetic.**

With that the entity vanished and the next root of Yggdrassil was sown in the Himalayas, as she vanished anew in yet another flash of sterile sickly-green light.

**Earth-19, the DC Bombshells Earth:**

What made Zatanna and John Constantine terrified most in retrospect was that Raven's otherworldly wail of terror came two minutes before the skies went dark and the false-stars with sickly green glows and ivory and gold light where the sickly green was not paramount manifested.

She had screamed:

_The axe is at the root of the trees!_

Both Zatanna and Constantine paused and then found themselves erecting a mighty shield, the mightiest they could offer when the eldritch magic fell from the skies and struck outward, inducing nightmares across the world, visions of a towering entity on a great throne and the name Azar in speech, sigil, and script burned into minds and foreheads. Only Los Angeles was spared the fullness of the impact by these shields, but it made the hours of noon-darkness, and the onset of the cloud darkness that carried with it an aether-shriek of madness and an endless all-devouring hunger. Darkseid and the Joker's Daughter were kindly angels of cherubic nature next to this. They were evil, but they could be reasoned with. This was a mind of terrible proportions and mages just strong enough to parry its strike, but not enough to avoid seeing the full horrors of that which was making its manifestation known. That they could parry it, however, meant that the family looked at each other with determination. Maybe, just maybe, they could strike, they could resist, they could stop whatever was coming.

 


End file.
